Prevent Biological Warfare By Stopping Its Source
You don’t allow it to be researched or produced. This isn’t hard to understand.
Richard Wise (May 9, p 1378) is wrong about secondary spread by anthrax in biological warfare.
There is no person-to-person spread of anthrax: the only reported case of such spread was when a loofa was shared, in fact, this is one reason why anthrax is a classic choice for such warfare: it only affects the area in which it is used and does not spread back toward the perpertrator.
Anthrax can however, mimic landmines, recurring unpredictably in the future from a soil reservoir
Anthrax was developed as a biological weapon by Japan in the 1930s, by the USA and Great Britain in the 1940s, and by other nations since. Yet in the intervening 60 years, only very limited use of it for biological warfare has been documented.
With respect to the administration of vaccines and other therapies in response to the threat of biological warfare, several points apply.
There has never been a trial of efficacy in man for the current US (or British) anthrax vaccine, and the issue of whether vaccinations (or their combination) contributed to development of Gulf War illnesses has yet to be resolved.
In particular, troops who were vaccinated in preparation but never deployed to the Gulf, and therefore lacked other Gulf-related exposures, have developed such illnesses.
Furthermore, both naturally occurring and recombinant strains of anthrax exist which are antibiotic and vaccine resistant. It is such strains that are likely to be used in a biological attack. If so, the proposed vaccinations and antibiotics are unlikely to have much impact.
To further complicate matters, the February, 1998, US Food and Drug Administration inspection report for the Michigan Biologic Products Institute (the sole US vaccine manufacturer) lists 11 pages of quality-control failures for anthrax vaccine production, including reuse of expired vaccine, grossly inadequate testing, and use of lots that failed testing.
It is generally agreed that a strong biological warfare treaty, one that includes full inspections and other verification methods, would not be 100% effective at preventing such warfare. Yet such a treaty would still have great positive effects.
The possibility of being inspected without warning would deter many programmes. UN inspections in Iraq have established the usefulness of such strategies at uncovering biological warfare programmes.
We should face the fact that microorganisms might be created against which our therapeutic arsenal would be impotent. Therefore, maximum efforts should be made in primary prevention such as adding teeth to the Biological Weapons Convention.
Yet the USA and some other nations continue to hold out against surprise inspections and full verification in the protocol to the convention that is now being negotiated.
Before we get caught up in a frenzy of stockpiling and use of vaccines, antibiotics, and other therapies, a careful evaluation needs to be made of their actual benefits and costs.
And strategies for prevention must be moved to the forefront of this debate.
[For the footnotes, which have been lost above, go here.]
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