The worst case bioterror scenario happened – no extinction

(Alan, “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Bioterrorist?”, 1-24, , DOA: 3-14-13, ldg)

The second problem is much more serious. Eliminating the toxins, we’re left with a list of infectious bacteria and viruses. With a single exception, these organisms are probably near-useless as weapons, and history proves it. There have been at least three well-documented military-style deployments of infectious agents from the list, plus one deployment of an agent that’s not on the list. I’m focusing entirely on the modern era, by the way. There are historical reports of armies catapulting plague-ridden corpses over city walls and conquistadors trying to inoculate blankets with Variola (smallpox), but it’s not clear those “attacks” were effective. Those diseases tended to spread like, well, plagues, so there’s no telling whether the targets really caught the diseases from the bodies and blankets, or simply picked them up through casual contact with their enemies. Of the four modern biowarfare incidents, two have been fatal. The first was the 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax incident, which killed an estimated 100 people. In that case, a Soviet-built biological weapons lab accidentally released a large plume of weaponized Bacillus anthracis (anthrax) over a major city. Soviet authorities tried to blame the resulting fatalities on “bad meat,” but in the 1990s Western investigators were finally able to piece together the real story. The second fatal incident also involved anthrax from a government-run lab: the 2001 “Amerithrax” attacks. That time, a rogue employee (or perhaps employees) of the government’s main bioweapons lab sent weaponized, powdered anthrax through the US postal service. Five people died. That gives us a grand total of around 105 deaths, entirely from agents that were grown and weaponized in officially-sanctioned and funded bioweapons research labs. Remember that. Terrorist groups have also deployed biological weapons twice, and these cases are very instructive. The first was the 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack, in which members of a cult in Oregon inoculated restaurant salad bars with Salmonella bacteria (an agent that’s not on the “select” list). 751 people got sick, but nobody died

. Public health authorities handled it as a conventional foodborne Salmonella outbreak, identified the sources and contained them. Nobody even would have known it was a deliberate attack if a member of the cult hadn’t come forward afterward with a confession. Lesson: our existing public health infrastructure was entirely adequate to respond to a major bioterrorist attack. The second genuine bioterrorist attack took place in 1993. Members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult successfully isolated and grew a large stock of anthrax bacteria, then sprayed it as an aerosol from the roof of a building in downtown Tokyo. The cult was well-financed, and had many highly educated members, so this release over the world’s largest city really represented a worst-case scenario. Nobody got sick or died. From the cult’s perspective, it was a complete and utter failure. Again, the only reason we even found out about it was a post-hoc confession. Aum members later demonstrated their lab skills by producing Sarin nerve gas, with far deadlier results. Lesson: one of the top “select agents” is extremely hard to grow and deploy even for relatively skilled non-state groups. It’s a really crappy bioterrorist weapon. Taken together, these events point to an uncomfortable but inevitable conclusion: our biodefense industry is a far greater threat to us than any actual bioterrorists.