Nearly five years have passed since the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan attempted a series of biological and chemical attacks. While one could take some solace in the fact that the biological attacks failed for technical reasons and possibly the consciences of individual members, the extreme danger was amply demonstrated in separate sarin attacks which killed four in a town and twelve in Tokyo subways, with 5000 injured! While the chance of such attacks may be lower than bombs and guns, the risks of being unprepared should a biological agent attack occur in the future impels responsible governments and laboratories to continue to assess the threat and means for countering it.

Biological terrorism poses unique challenges in defense, public health, and law enforcement. While biological weapons require a reasonable level of sophistication to manufacture and deploy, they are generally more accessible to a terrorist group than nuclear materials and technology. Production activities can be readily concealed and the basic equipment, such as fermenters, concentrators, dryers, and milling equipment, is readily available. If these agents were dispersed optimally, they could inflict casualties comparable to nuclear bombs. Biological agents are also easy to conceal and smuggle across borders, a particular concern for the United States, with its borders north and south open to friendly neighbors. One only needs look at the ease with which drug smugglers operate across our borders and coasts to imagine the danger this could pose.

Emerging Threats Assessment:

An important element of national threat assessment and prevention strategy has always been a mandate to reduce the risks associated with technological surprise. Such risks are exacerbated in dynamically changing technological environments. Today, rapid advances in computer technology, telecommunications, nanotechnology, specialized materials, and biotechnology promise to hold ever-growing opportunity for emergent threats against the security and performance of devices deriving from those areas and related systems. There is a demonstrable national need to provide advanced assessment and warning of emergent technologies with possible terrorist applications, or with enhanced vulnerabilities to known threats. Examples of emergent threats assessment include genetic engineering, which not only offers the opportunity to protect and/or cure biological systems, but also to create biological threats of enhanced lethality and selectivity to human health. The purpose of the emergent threats assessment program will be to convene on a regular basis leading experts across a wide range of contributing technologies so as to continually be alert to such new emergent threats.

Background:

There are many possible scenarios for biological terrorism. An agent could be distributed as an aerosol, introduced into the food or water supply, on a small or large scale, or even targeted toward a particular consumer product. Biological toxins could cause rapid, mass casualties, comparable to the use of chemical weapons. Infectious agents may not only be lethal to their first contacts in a dose smaller than chemical agents, but may lead to an epidemic, which spreads the threat wider. Imagine the use of such an agent in a transportation hub such that the infection is quickly spread over a wide area, overwhelming public health departmentsí need for medication and vaccines. Rapid detection and medical response is the key to minimizing the damage that might be caused by biological attacks. The publicís primal fear of biological weapons is likely to cause widespread panic or even civil disorder. Attacks with infectious agents could be categorized into: Current pathogens Genetically selected pathogens, possessing increased virulence and/or resistance Genetically engineered pathogens, not currently known.

There is an ongoing revolution in genomics and computational biology. With the recent mapping of the human genome and a number of complete microbial genomes, functional genetic research is progressing rapidly. The major challenge of genomics is to use computational and biochemical tools to understand the significance of the mass of sequence data, which we now have for humans and microbes. Not only must we understand the nature of emerging threats, but we also must look for ways that science might rapidly screen sequence data to identify and characterize a biological attack. Identification of a disease organism by laboratory culture currently takes 48 hours or more. Concurrently, antibiotic resistance can also be tested. Additionally, agents such as anthrax may not be correctly identified initially because of unfamiliarity or failure to employ additional special tests. A biological agent attack requires more immediate determination for proper response. Emerging Threats Assessment will play a critical role in planning and developing rapid screening for currently known or potentially unknown pathogenic organisms/toxins in an easy and reliable test. Recent developments using DNA amplification and DNA microarrays could enable such an assay to be developed. Using the DNA polymerase chain reaction it is possible to amplify specific DNA molecules present in a sample in concentrations as low as a single molecule. By utilizing a mixture of DNA primers representing genes from suspected organisms, the pathogenic DNA sequences in a sample could be amplified and labeled with fluorescent markers. Hybridization of this mixture to a suitable DNA microarray would then immediately reveal which specific disease organisms were present in the original sample. Computerized pattern recognition systems would be used to rapidly analyze the data obtained from the DNA microarray. Microbiological tests to confirmthe presence of the pathogenic organism could then proceed after appropriate treatment and containment measures were already underway. By creating a DNA microarray bearing genetic information from a wide variety of potential threat organisms (including those rarely seen in clinical practice), we could cut the time needed for effective emergency response from days to just hours.

In a second response initiative, we may use our expanding knowledge in the field of genomics to anticipate future threats from unknown organisms. One scenario could be to produce a pathogenic organism genetically resistant to three or four of the most common antibiotic treatments. One or two Ph.D. level, scientists, working on behalf of a terrorist organization, could stand a reasonable chance of success in such an undertaking. Without the technological advances just described, precious time would elapse during the aftermath of an attack while the resistance profile of the organism was characterized. Physicians could struggle in vain treating victims with combinations of ineffective drugs, while new cases of disease appeared every hour.

Conclusion- Biothreats and Designer Microbes:

Since the end of the Cold War, policymakers have paid increasing attention to the threat posed by unconventional weapons, particularly biological arms. Though banned by treaty among the major states, biological weapons seem an attractive target for rogue nations and terrorist organizations, either foreign or domestic. Iraq, for example, has had an active biological weapons program since about 1974, producing mass quantities of anthrax spores, ricin, and other toxic and pathogenic agents. The Soviet Union likewise sustained a vast effort to produce new biological weapons, even after renouncing their development in 1972. The Soviet ìBiopreparat,î which involved up to 50,000 people, sought to manufacture biological weapons for each potential theater of operations, including communicable viruses for strategic attack on enemy population centers. Anthrax and equine encephalitis were planned for battlefield use. More recently, the activities of the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan have lent credence to the threat that extremist groups may use biological weapons against civilian populations. While the groupís sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system has garnered the most attention, Aum Shinrikyo also made numerous attempts in the early 1990s to disseminate biological agents including anthrax and botulin toxin. Fortunately, for various reasons, these attempts failed. But the potential seriousness may be appreciated from the finding that the cult maintained laboratory facilities with multi-ton annual production capacities, and even attempted to acquire the lethal ebola virus during the last major African outbreak.

Modern warfare has shown the appalling acts terrorists, tribes, and nations can commit when confronting overwhelming tactical superiority. Chinese authors have recently published a book, which discusses this as a military option. This asymmetry in conventional weapons and nuclear power leads some to choose the asymmetric weapons of biological terrorism. In countering such possible ìasymmetricî threats, the U.S. should make use of its superiority in genetics and information technologies to detect, characterize, to respond to, and defuse any potential attacks with the minimum loss of life. The Emerging Threats Assessment Program will play an important role by hosting conferences to anticipate and evaluate future biological terrorist threats.