[The Tribune,
India]
The Tribune, India
The Growing Planetary Threat from Biological Weapons and Terrorism
"They are easy and inexpensive
to manufacture, weaponize and deliver. They have a
long shelf life and are virtually impossible to detect and, therefore, verify;
in just a few small refrigerators or freezers, sufficient biological weapons
can be stored that would kill the entire population of the world many times
over."
By Dr. Pushpa M. Bhargava*
November 30, 2008
India - The Tribune -
Home Page (English)
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| Clostridium botulinum: The rod-shaped bacterium that produces the neurotoxin botulin. |
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If you were James Bond and
were ordered to kill half the population of a city of two million, without
notice and without the resources of a major power at your command, what would
you do? Another Hiroshima? No. You would take just a
gram or two of a toxin called botulin and put it in
the city's water supply.
The amount of botulin required to kill 50 percent of a group [LD50] is
0.6 nanograms per kg of a person's weight (1 nanogram is 1 billionth of a gram). And there will be no
damage to property! Further, as botulin is a protein
and all proteins decay sooner or later, the water contaminated with it will
become potable in a while. Small wonder, botulin is
one of the most powerful biological weapons. Such weapons have the following
advantages.
[Editor's Note: Botulinum toxin is a neurotoxic
protein produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum.
And though it's highly toxic, it is used in minute doses to
treat muscle spasms and as a cosmetic treatment (Botox).]
They are easy and inexpensive
to manufacture, weaponize and deliver. They have a
long shelf life and are virtually impossible to detect and, therefore, verify;
in just a few small refrigerators or freezers, one can store sufficient
biological weapons to kill the entire population of the world many times over -
and this is what Saddam Hussein probably did.
One has a wide range of
choices, from agents that lead to virtually 100 percent mortality to agents
that lead to little mortality but high morbidity [levels of infection]; or from
agents that would have an immediate effect, to agents that would have a delayed
effect (silent warfare!) One can also develop ethnic-specific weapons. For example, those that will kill or hurt Americans but not
Indians.
Biological weapons can be
either live bacteria, fungi (especially for targeting plants) and viruses or
toxins. But fungi has the potential of multiplying after the organism is
released and thus causing far more extensive damage over longer periods of time
than fungi.
Today’s repertoire of live
biological weapons includes (where not obvious, parenthesis give the disease
caused by the bacterium, virus or rickettsia):
Chlamydia peittaci (Influenza psittacosis); Yellow
fever virus; Dengue fever virus; Chikungunya virus; O’nyong-nyong virus; Mayaro
virus; Ross River virus; Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus; Western equine
encephalitis virus; Tick-borne encephalitis virus; Kyasanur
Forest Disease virus; Rift Valley fever virus; Junin
and other similar viruses (Argentinan haemorrhagic fever); Hantaan
virus (Korean haemorrhagic fever); Lassa fever virus;
Sindbis virus; Marburg virus; Congo Crimean virus
(African haemorrhagic fever); Ebola virus; Variola virus (small pox); Vibrio
cholarae (cholera); Salmonella typhose
(typhoid); Shigella (dysentry);
Francisella tularensis
(tularemia); Brucella species; Clostridium tetani (tetanus); Clostridium perfringens
(gangrene); Pasteurella pestis
(plague); Bacillus anthracis (anthrax); Antinobacillus mallei (glanders); Rickettsia prowazakii (epidemic typhus); Rickettsia
tsutsugamushi (scrub typhus); Coxiella
burnetii (G-fever); Rickettsia
rickettsii (Rocky Mountain spotted fever).
One need be infected with
only 25 tularemia-causing microorganisms 
to run the risk of death. The toxins produced
or studied as potential biological warfare agents are: Botulin
(Clostridium botulinum toxin A); Enterotoxin
B from Staphylococcus aureus; Saxitoxin
(shellfish poison); Cobrotoxin; Crotoxin
(from South American rattle snake); Myotoxin; Cardiotoxin; Bungarotoxin; Aflatoxin; Snail conotoxin;
Scorpion toxins; Ricin (derived from castor beans);
Substance P; Tetanus toxin; Trichothecene mycotoxins; Shiga toxin (from Shigella
dysenteriae or S flexneri);
Epsilon toxin from Clostridium perfringens).
And then there are fungi like
Puccinia graminis
(black-stem rust of cereals) and Pyricularia oryzae (rice blast) which can destroy entire fields of
agriculture when sprayed in very small amounts. Before the collapse of their
empire in 606 BC, the Assyrians used an ingenious method of poisoning the
enemy. Rye, widely used at that time, is liable to attack by a poisonous
fungus, Claviceps purpurea,
which grows in place of the grain and forms a horny mass called ergot. Eating
rye bread contaminated with ergot can cause gangrene, abortion and
hallucinations. The Assyrians used this rye-ergot to poison their enemies.
[Although the Assyrians knew
of ergot, a fungus of rye with effects similar to LSD, there is no evidence
that they poisoned enemy wells with ergot, as has often been claimed
].
The ancient Romans threw
carrion into wells to poison the drinking water of their adversaries.
In 1347, the Tartars
catapulted the bodies of bubonic-plague victims over the city walls of Kaffa, a Black Sea port that served as a gateway to the
silk-trade route - a maneuver that worked.
[Editor's Note: The popular
theory places the first cases of bubonic-plague in the steppes of Central Asia
... from Central Asia it was carried east and west along the Silk Road by
Mongol armies and traders during the Pax Mongolica. It was reportedly first introduced to Europe at
the trading city of Kaffa in the Crimea in 1347.
After a protracted siege, during which the Mongol army was suffering the
disease, they catapulted infected corpses over the city walls to spread the disease
to the inhabitants .
The total number of deaths
worldwide is estimated to have been 75 million people, approximately 25–50 million of
which occurred in Europe. The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30 to
60 percent of Europe's population.]
In 1942, the Soviets infected
German occupation troops with the Tularemia-causing agent, which eventually led
to more than 100,000 cases of the disease on both sides. Between 1936 and 1945,
Japanese Military Unit-731 experimented with biological weapons on Chinese at PingFan in Manchuria, killing 3,559 prisoners of war with
agents like anthrax, cholera, plague and dysentery .
On several occasions, the Japanese also released plague on the Chinese civilian
population of Hunan Province by releasing from aircraft, fleas that had fed on
infected rats. In fact between 1940 and 1950, China was plagued by disease from
Japan’s biological weapons (typhus, bubonic plague, cholera and anthrax).
In 1978, Soviet intelligence
agents used ricin to murder Georgi
Markov ,
a defector from Bulgaria. In 1979, an accidental release of anthrax from the
Soviet bioweapons facility in Sverdlovsk killed some
100 people and much livestock . In 1984,
Salmonella was released by the cult followers of Bhagwan
Rajneesh in salad bars in four restaurants in The Dalles
in Oregon, U.S. , which made 750
people ill; the objective was apparently to influence a local election by
keeping voters from the polls! And between 1990 and 1995, the Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikyo, made several
unsuccessful attempts to use biological weapons including botulin .
In 1763, U.S. Whites used
blankets and handkerchiefs infected with small pox virus against the Red
Indians [Pontiac's Rebellion ]; this led to
the deaths of 6 million of America's native Indians.
In 1955, U.S. scientists
sprayed Q-fever bacteria in a slurry [a watery mixture of insoluble matter] over Utah on
human test subjects; not only were they infected, but so were soldiers manning
the road blocks! During the Bay of Pigs conflict, the U.S. used the pig
plague-causing organism in Cuba. And the Anthrax attack in the U.S. just after
9/11 was almost a contained act of biological warfare.
Advances in modern biology
have opened up avenues for making designer biological weapons which would, say,
exploit genetic or ethnic differences. For example, in the U.S., those who are
above 50 have a comparatively weaker immune response [then Indians]. They would
thus be far more susceptible to small doses of certain toxic antigens (living
organisms or chemicals) which would have no effect on the adult Indian
population. Proper release of these antigens in the environment could cause at
least temporary disability amongst Americans over 50, while not affecting
Indians. Indeed, when it comes to developing and using biological weapons, it
is essentially a battle of wits - something in which, perhaps, the deprived
part of the world has an advantage, since in any case, they've been living by
their wits all along!
The Soviets have developed
genetically modified Legionella bacteria that have
been shown to induce auto-immunity to myelin (an important component of nerve
and brain) in mice; when infected with this bacterium the mice die a horrific
death.
In 2002, a group of
Australian genetic engineers accidentally created a mouse virus that kills
every one of its victims by wrecking its immune response - something like what
HIV does. There would be, as of today, no defense against such a human virus.
Posted by WORLDMEETS.US
And the question whether
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome [SARS ] was being
developed by China as a biological warfare agent and happened to leak out of
the lab has never been satisfactorily answered.
Despite being signatories to
the Biological Weapons Convention, at least the U.K., the U.S., Russia, Canada,
Germany, South Africa, Japan, Iraq, Iran, Syria and North Korea have had
extensive biological weapons development and testing programs - in some cases
for at least 80 years.
When, during the Iraq-Kuwait
conflict from January 16 to February 20, 1991, Saddam Hussein said that he had
the final weapon, several of us predicted that he had biological weapons like botulin or anthrax spores that could be put on a Scud
missile warhead, even though Iraq had initially denied
that it had a biological warfare program.
On May 31, 1991, the
distinguished American scientist, Mathew Meselson,
and this writer were invited to address ambassadors in Geneva at Chateau de Bossey on Lake Geneva, under the auspices of a residential
conference on biological weapons. During a lecture that evening, this writer
mentioned Saddam Hussein having biological weapons. Immediately after the
meeting, organizers introduced me to two German gentlemen who had set up
biological weapons factories in Iraq! These were the factories unearthed later
by the CIA.
Subsequently, Iraq declared
it had 157 aerial bombs and 25 warheads with botulin,
anthrax spores and aflatoxin, the first two of which
are the most fatal biological weapons known. An area of 18 sq km that was
fenced in and maintained by Iraq was devoted to making single cell protein and
housed facilities for making biological weapons. In 1995 it was discovered that
during the 1980s, Iraq had imported 40 tons of bacterial growth media the only
purpose of which could be for making biological weapons.
Posted by WORLDMEETS.US
According to the U.S. Defense
Department, there are large stockpiles of Anthrax in Syria, Iran, Libya, China,
South and North Korea, Taiwan and Israel. Strangely, it excludes itself and the
U.K. where the stockpiles perhaps are the largest. In 1944, the U.S. provided
funds to produce 275,000 botulin bombs and one
million anthrax bombs.
In 2003, the U.S. Government
gave $1.5 billion as an additional grant to an institution (National Institute
of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, or NIAID) to work on selected biological warfare agents: to
develop an enzyme to lyse anthrax bacilli; and to
further work on a vaccine that seems to have been developed by a NIAID scientist against Ebola (the vaccine was being tried
on monkeys in 2003). Over the past seven years, the U.S. has spent over $57
billion to shore up American Bioterror Defenses,
stockpiling drugs against biological weapons, networking detection systems in
more than 10 cities and preparedness at hospitals.
After World War II, in
exchange for 8,000 pages of Japanese data, the U.S. gave immunity to
Lieutenant-General Shiro Ishia,
who began work on biological warfare in Japan in 1931. In 1950, the U.S. had
large stockpiles of mosquitoes infected with Yellow Fever, Malaria, Dengue and Plague;
and ticks infected with Tularemia .
When a few
years ago, there was an epidemic of measles in the U.S., officials wondered if
it was an act of biological warfare.
But the systems they have are so effective that they traced it to a Romanian
girl who unknowingly brought the infection into the country. Unfortunately, we
don't have such a system and thus can't be sure that the Surat
plague or the various other episodes of Chikungunya
weren't surreptitious acts of biological warfare.
Experts have identified pest
strains in some imported food which aren't known to occur in India. In fact,
despite it now being clear that such an attack is far more likely than a
nuclear attack given the comparative cost of biological weapons, India is
completely unprepared for a biological weapons attack. Biological weapons are
the poor man’s atom bomb.
What we need to do
-- Prepare an appropriate
database with a mechanism to update it.
-- Work out mechanisms of dissemination
of appropriate information to the public
-- Set up a first-rate
laboratory that meets international standards for research into biological
weapons and ways and means of detecting and combating them (in real time).
-- Set up a laboratory for
testing samples in real time like the Center for Disease Control in the U.S.
-- Introduce a course on
biological weapons in the medical curricula, in the training program for civil
servants, and in the training module of police, defense and intelligence services.
-- Set up a high power
level coordination council consisting of defense personnel, police,
scientists, medical personnel and National Security Advisory Board to plan and
execute the above.
*Dr. Pushpa M. Bhargava is former director of the Centre for Cellular Molecular Biology
in Hyderabad
[Posted by WORLDMEETS.US December
1, 5:42am]
