| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"PagCal" |
| Date: |
30 Dec 2004 01:59:28 AM |
| Object: |
Washington Post Is MisInformed on Biowarfare |
This article is quite untrue. You can buy an aerosol sprayer in any auto
parts store for five bucks. You don't have to spoorolate anthrax to make
it into a weapon. You don't have to buy Anthrax in a store - Anthrax is
naturally occuring in the Southwest; over 2,000 cows die every year from
it. It doesn't matter if it's antibiotic resistant or not once it gets a
foothold in your lungs and by the time it starts showing up in the blood
stream, you're dead.
---
washingtonpost.com
Technical Hurdles Separate Terrorists From Biowarfare
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 30, 2004; Page A01
Hoping to hasten the doomsday their leader foretold, scientists who were
members of Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult brewed batches of anthrax in the
early 1990s and released it from an office building and out the back of
trucks upwind of the Imperial Palace.
But the wet mixture kept clogging the sprayers the Aum Shinrikyo
scientists had rigged up, and, unbeknown to them, the strains of anthrax
they had ordered from a commercial firm posed no danger to anyone.
Frustrated by their failure at biowarfare, they turned to a less arduous
method of mass killing -- chemical attack -- and in 1995 killed 12 Tokyo
subway riders by releasing sarin gas in the tunnels.
The cult's experiences demonstrate just a few of the myriad technical
obstacles that terrorists who might try to manufacture biological
weapons could face, problems that would confound even skilled scientists
who tried to help them, biological warfare experts say.
Locating virulent anthrax specimens with which to brew an attack-size
batch would be difficult given the medical community's caution about
suspicious buyers. Smallpox could be next to impossible to obtain
because it is thought to exist in only two secure sites, in Russia and
in the United States.
Creating aerosolized microbes also requires expertise in many arcane
scientific disciplines, such as culturing and propagating germs that
retain their virulence and "weaponizing" them so they float like a gas
and enter the lungs easily.
But specialists also say it is all but inevitable that al Qaeda or
another terrorist group will gain the expertise to launch small-scale
biological attacks and eventually inflict mass casualties. Information
on the mechanics of creating bioweapons is easily accessible on the
Internet and in technical manuals, and the equipment to do the job is
readily found. Many brew pubs, for example, have fermenters that can
cook up deadly germs.
Advances in bioscience, and the rapid dissemination of this knowledge
worldwide, are making it easier for even undergraduates to create
dangerous pathogens. Creating microbe weapons is more challenging than
producing the simplest implements of terrorism -- conventional
explosives or chemical weapons -- but much less difficult than the most
technically daunting -- nuclear weapons -- experts say.
Richard Danzig, a former Navy secretary and now a biowarfare consultant
to the Pentagon, said that while there are 1,000 to 10,000 "weaponeers"
worldwide with experience working on biological arms, there are more
than 1 million and perhaps many millions of "broadly skilled" scientists
who, while lacking training in that narrow field, could construct
bioweapons.
"It seems likely that, over a period between a few months and a few
years, broadly skilled individuals equipped with modest laboratory
equipment can develop biological weapons," Danzig said. "Only a thin
wall of terrorist ignorance and inexperience now protects us."
Some agents are simpler than others to weaponize. Toxins such as
botulinum, which is not contagious and unlikely to cause mass
casualties, are the easiest to turn into weapons, particularly for a
food-borne or water-borne attack. Bacterial agents such as anthrax,
which also is not contagious, are more difficult to manufacture. Viruses
such as smallpox, which is contagious and could kill millions, are
tougher still.
The most challenging are some of the new 21st-century bioweapons that
scientists contemplate being created in the future -- but experts
believe even these compounds are fast becoming easier to produce.
In 2002, a panel of biowarfare experts concluded in a report
co-published by the National Defense University (NDU) that while
terrorists could mount some small-scale bioattacks, larger assaults
would require them to overcome many technical hurdles. Some key
biotechnologies would be achievable only three to four years from then,
the panel found.
"When we sent out the report for review to [hands-on] bench scientists,
we got the response, 'What do you mean we can't do this? We're doing it
now,' " said Raymond Zilinskas, a co-author of the report who heads
biowarfare studies at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a
California think tank. "It shows how fast the field is moving."
Those skeptical of the prospect of large-scale bioattacks cite the tiny
number of biological strikes in recent decades. Members of the
Rajneeshee cult sickened 750 people in 1984 when they contaminated salad
bars in 10 Oregon restaurants with salmonella. Among the few others were
the 2001 anthrax attacks through the U.S. mail that killed five people.
One reason for the small number of attacks is that nearly every aspect
of a bioterrorist's job is difficult. The best chance of acquiring the
anthrax bacterium, Bacillus anthracis, is either from commercial culture
collections in countries with lax security controls, or by digging in
soil where livestock recently died of the disease -- a tactic Aum
Shinrikyo tried unsuccessfully in the Australian Outback.
Once virulent stocks of anthrax have been cultured, it is no trivial
task to propagate pathogens with the required attributes for an
aerosolized weapon: the hardiness to survive in an enclosed container
and upon release into the atmosphere, the ability to lodge in the lungs,
and the toxicity to kill. The particles' size is crucial: If they are
too big, they fall to the ground, and if they are too small, they are
exhaled from the body. If they are improperly made, static electricity
can cause them to clump.
Making a bug that defeats antibiotics, a desired goal for any
bioweaponeer, is relatively simple but can require laborious trial and
error, because conferring antibiotic resistance often reduces a
bioweapon's killing power. Field-testing germ weapons is necessary even
for experienced weapons makers, and that is likely to require open
spaces where animals or even people can be experimentally infected.
Each bioagent demands specific weather conditions and requires
unforgiving specifications for the spraying device employed. "Dry"
anthrax is harder to make -- it requires special equipment, and
scientists must perform the dangerous job of milling particles to the
right size. "Wet" anthrax is easier to produce but not as easily dispersed.
Experts agree that anthrax is the potential mass-casualty agent most
accessible to terrorists. The anthrax letter sent in 2001 to then-Senate
Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) contained one gram of
anthrax, or 1 trillion spores.
In a 2003 report for the Pentagon, Danzig estimated that if terrorists
released a much larger amount of skillfully made anthrax particles under
optimal weather conditions in a large city, 200,000 people in an area 40
miles downwind of the release would be infected, and, if untreated,
180,000 of them would die. Smaller numbers would die as far as 120 miles
away.
Government officials would probably realize that an attack had occurred
a day or two later, when victims began to show up in emergency rooms
with flulike symptoms. Guessing the geographical spread of the attack,
officials would then order emergency distribution of ciprofloxacin or
other antibiotics, which would probably save many lives -- although
experts agree the public health response would be likely to be chaotic
and possibly ineffective.
For most experts, the most frightening anthrax scenario is an
antibiotic-resistant bug, which many say is not far-fetched. It is "one
of the big things we're worried about," Philip K. Russell, a top
bioterrorism adviser in the Department of Health and Human Services,
said in an August interview in the trade journal Biosecurity. "It's my
view that we have about three or four years to come up with a solution
to multidrug-resistant anthrax. . . . We haven't taken anthrax off the
table as a threat that can create a very big disaster."
Government officials also said they accept a Danzig theory that
terrorists probably would launch bioattacks against various cities
simultaneously or sequentially, using a tactic he calls "reload." Danzig
said it would be designed to overwhelm government responses and
undermine public confidence in officials.
"Our national power to manage the consequences of repeated biological
attacks could be exhausted while the terrorist ability to reload remains
intact," he wrote in the Pentagon report.
The 2002 NDU study -- led by Zilinskas and Seth Carus, a biowarfare
expert at the university -- concluded that at that time, large-scale
bioweapons were less likely to be fashioned by terrorists than by
nations such as Iran, or by disgruntled bioscientists. The report also
detailed the skill levels necessary to accomplish various
biowarfare-related tasks. A "junior scientist," for example, could use
genetic engineering to weaponize both bacterial and viral pathogens.
Experts say that since then, the spread of knowledge and the increasing
availability of sophisticated equipment have placed more and more
complex tasks within the ability of less-skilled people. Some experts
expressed concern about the easy availability of inexpensive biological
"kits" from commercial catalogues that streamline cloning and other
once-daunting tasks.
The Zilinskas-Carus report said it is "chancy" to estimate which weapons
terrorists could make after 2005 because of scientists' increasing
ability to synthesize and manipulate biological material such as DNA.
"Novel DNA sequences are being designed and inserted into living cells
by undergraduates," said Roger Brent, a biowarfare expert who is
president of the Molecular Sciences Institute, a leading research group
in Berkeley, Calif.
Some scientists doubt terrorists will master genetically altered
superbugs. But Brent and other experts raise the specter of terrorists'
hiring scientists who can insert a toxin into, say, a bioengineered SARS
virus, which would then be as contagious as severe acute respiratory
syndrome and as fatal as the toxin inside it.
Last year, Brent told a study panel convened by the CIA that current
biological capability resembles the capacity of computers in 1965, or
English cotton mills in the 1800s -- technologies on the cusp of
explosive growth. He said the day is coming when not only terrorists but
"garage hackers" will be able to assemble bioweapons.
The CIA panel's late 2003 report, "The Darker Bioweapons Future," said
that "the same science that may cure some of our worst diseases could be
used to create the world's most frightening weapons. The know-how to
develop some of these weapons already exists."
Even banned viruses such as smallpox might be employed one day by
terrorists who sidestep the difficulty of obtaining them by synthesizing
agents that resemble them, Brent told the panel. "Once synthesized," he
said, they "can be grown in indefinite quantities."
"The Rubicon has already been crossed and the process of creating novel
genetically engineered orthopoxviruses [diseases including smallpox] is
irrevocable," Ken Alibek, a former Soviet bioscientist who defected to
the United States, wrote recently in a scholarly journal. "It is just a
matter of time before this knowledge will result in the creation of
super-killer poxviruses." He added: "If a threat, no matter how small,
of a smallpox attack exists, it must be addressed" by developing
smallpox detection systems and medicines.
"The alternative," Alibek wrote, "is to remain as helpless as the
millions of people who died of smallpox over previous centuries."
.
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| User: "Ken Cornelius" |
|
| Title: Re: Washington Post Is MisInformed on Biowarfare |
30 Dec 2004 10:32:14 AM |
|
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"PagCal" <pagcal@runbox.com> wrote in message
news:p7CdnRIhr4n_KE7cRVn-rA@giganews.com...
This article is quite untrue. You can buy an aerosol sprayer in any auto
parts store for five bucks. You don't have to spoorolate anthrax to make
it into a weapon. You don't have to buy Anthrax in a store - Anthrax is
naturally occuring in the Southwest; over 2,000 cows die every year from
it. It doesn't matter if it's antibiotic resistant or not once it gets a
foothold in your lungs and by the time it starts showing up in the blood
stream, you're dead.
---
If naturally occurring Anthrax is all that widespread and infectious, you'd
think it would kill more than 2000 cows, wouldn't you? Lots more. Cows
spend a great deal of time with their noses in the dirt and eating stuff
with dirt and dust all over it. Humans don't. How many humans die each
year from Anthrax? If you wanted to kill someone, you might do better
hitting them with a bat than spraying anthrax at them.
.
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| User: "PagCal" |
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| Title: Re: Washington Post Is MisInformed on Biowarfare |
31 Dec 2004 05:00:11 AM |
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Ken Cornelius wrote:
"PagCal" <pagcal@runbox.com> wrote in message
news:p7CdnRIhr4n_KE7cRVn-rA@giganews.com...
This article is quite untrue. You can buy an aerosol sprayer in any auto
parts store for five bucks. You don't have to spoorolate anthrax to make
it into a weapon. You don't have to buy Anthrax in a store - Anthrax is
naturally occuring in the Southwest; over 2,000 cows die every year from
it. It doesn't matter if it's antibiotic resistant or not once it gets a
foothold in your lungs and by the time it starts showing up in the blood
stream, you're dead.
---
If naturally occurring Anthrax is all that widespread and infectious, you'd
think it would kill more than 2000 cows, wouldn't you? Lots more. Cows
spend a great deal of time with their noses in the dirt and eating stuff
with dirt and dust all over it. Humans don't. How many humans die each
year from Anthrax? If you wanted to kill someone, you might do better
hitting them with a bat than spraying anthrax at them.
The meat industry hides these facts from the public, but it's true, 2000
cows a year come down with Anthrax.
They used to bury the carcuses, but Anthrax used to spoorilate and live
on another 100 years. Any cow grazing over the burial spot would loft a
few spoors and come down with it.
Today, of course, they burn the carcus, so the risk, slowly over time,
is dropping to zero.
Anthrax is hard to get into the lungs unless you turn either the spoor
or the bacteria into an aerosol.
.
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| User: "Divin Marquis" |
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| Title: Re: Washington Post Is MisInformed on Biowarfare |
30 Dec 2004 05:53:20 PM |
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Le Thu, 30 Dec 2004 02:59:28 -0500, PagCal a écrit :
This article is quite untrue. You can buy an aerosol sprayer in any auto
parts store for five bucks. You don't have to spoorolate anthrax to make
it into a weapon. You don't have to buy Anthrax in a store - Anthrax is
naturally occuring in the Southwest; over 2,000 cows die every year from
it. It doesn't matter if it's antibiotic resistant or not once it gets a
foothold in your lungs and by the time it starts showing up in the blood
stream, you're dead.
You are very confused. It is, indeed, very difficult to keep biological
agents concentrated (you want to make one bomb, not a few hundred tons of
material) AND active (cuz' otherwise it won't do *****, duh!)
And then you need to disperse it. You can't just blow it up: heat and
pressure destroy the agents.
.
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| User: "PagCal" |
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| Title: Re: Washington Post Is MisInformed on Biowarfare |
31 Dec 2004 04:57:10 AM |
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Divin Marquis wrote:
Le Thu, 30 Dec 2004 02:59:28 -0500, PagCal a écrit :
This article is quite untrue. You can buy an aerosol sprayer in any auto
parts store for five bucks. You don't have to spoorolate anthrax to make
it into a weapon. You don't have to buy Anthrax in a store - Anthrax is
naturally occuring in the Southwest; over 2,000 cows die every year from
it. It doesn't matter if it's antibiotic resistant or not once it gets a
foothold in your lungs and by the time it starts showing up in the blood
stream, you're dead.
You are very confused. It is, indeed, very difficult to keep biological
agents concentrated (you want to make one bomb, not a few hundred tons of
material) AND active (cuz' otherwise it won't do *****, duh!)
And then you need to disperse it. You can't just blow it up: heat and
pressure destroy the agents.
You don't have to concentrate it for a weapon; which means to
spoorilation, and no change from a liquid to a powder. Dispersal, is
easy; just spray the liquid.
Not a small weapon, mind you. You'd hijack a fuel oil delivery truck,
grow the bugs there, then just drive around town spraying the stuff into
the air.
The trouble with the author was, he was thinking as a weapons scientist,
not a terrorist.
.
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