After the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon, government officials are beginning to imagine
something even worse - a chemical or biological attack that
could kill thousands, if not millions. How a large city would
react to a bioterrorism attack became a key concern for
governments and health experts after the Aum Shinrikyo Sarin
nerve gas attack on Tokyo?s underground system in March
1995. The attack killed 12, and made thousands of people ill.
?Many experts believe that it is no longer a matter of ?if?
but ?when? such an attack will occur,? said James Hughes,
director of Health and Human Services Department National
Center for Infectious Diseases, in a recent public testimony
before Congress.
The most likely scenario would be a combined attack,
according to Tim Brown of GlobalSecurity.org. ?For a terrorist
the type of weapon doesn?t really matter. What matters is
causing the greatest number of casualties,? he says. ?A
scenario could be, for instance, a suicide bombing in the
subway, combined at the same time with the release of
anthrax or a deadly virus, which are invisible. The problem is
that emergency and rescue personnel are not trained to
recognize what?s going on. They would flock to the scene.?
Despite plans to combat germ warfare, some experts remain
skeptical of our ability to cope. ?We are not prepared at the
national level,? warns Michael Osterholm, director of the
center for infectious research and policy at the University of
Minnesota. ?We need more resources - disease surveillance
and rapid response in case of a catastrophic epidemic
outbreak.?
A study of 200 hospitals published in the American Journal of
Public Health in May shows only one hospital in five has
emergency plans to cope with a biological or chemical attack.
Less than a third have sufficient antidotes to respond to a
nerve gas attack. And only one in 10 has mobile respiratory
equipment available for doctors treating the injured. ?The first
line of defense would be to prevent terrorists getting into the
country,? Brown says. ?The psychological effect of such an
attack would be a widespread panic, far beyond the area
where it took place.?
The sarin gas attack in Tokyo did not take many victims, but
it woke up U.S. authorities. When a hoax canister
marked ?nerve gas? was discovered in a cellar in the New
York borough of Queens in 1997, it inspired New York Mayor
Rudy Giuliani to put together an emergency plan in case of
such an attack. The emergency plan subsequently put in
place by is considered by Steve Macko, risk analyst at the
Emergency Response and Research Institute in Chicago
(ERRI), to be the most advanced in the country.
Very few details of the plan, which is designed to improve the
readiness of emergency rescue teams, ensure a swift
response to attack and protect civilians, have been made
public. It includes equipping 12 vehicles with equipment to
prevent the spread of a chemical or germ attack, as well as
several hundred handheld detectors, some as small as a
matchbox, containing antibodies capable of indicating the
presence of infectious bacteria within 10 minutes. City
authorities have negotiated access to regional hospitals in
case of emergency, as well as made a deal with
pharmaceutical companies to provide huge quantities of
vaccines and antidotes. And some 4,000 New York police
officers, firemen and health workers have been given quasi-
military training on how to cope with an assault of this nature.
?The likelihood is high enough that we have to be prepared,?
says Philip Russell, professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins
University. ?Terrorists tend to shift their strategies and their
tactics. As we develop defenses, they seek new ways. So it?s
quite probable that sometime in the future somebody will try
a biological attack of one sort or another. We do have to be
prepared for the worst scenario - for a smallpox release that
would trigger a global pandemic. We are not prepared today.
Our smallpox vaccine [stock] has not been restored.?
Tests done by the Army in St. Louis and elsewhere in the
Midwest in the 1950s proved how easily biological weapons
can spread across large areas. ?There are so many variables
that play an enormous role in how a biological weapon is
delivered,? says Bruce Clements, associate director of the
Center for the Study of Bioterrorism & Emerging Infections at
St. Louis University. Clements and other experts have studied
the factors that determine where a biological agent can go
and whether it will be dangerous when it gets there. Among
the variables are a range of weather conditions, the type of
agent, how much is released and exposure to sunlight.
During the Cold War, the Army secretly sprayed test particles
on the ground and in the air as part of a biological weapons
research program. Details of the experiments were revealed in
documents declassified in the mid-1990s. The aim was to
track the ways biological weapons disperse.
The researchers used zinc cadmium sulfide particles, because
they are about the same size and weight as biological agents.
They are also fluorescent and can be easily traced.
In one group of tests, the Army in 1953 sprayed 35 clouds of
zinc cadmium sulfide particles from street corners in St. Louis
and tracked the clouds over two 25-square-block areas.
Army officials made up a cover story to win city approval of
the tests by claiming they were intended to see if smoke
screens could protect the city from Soviet bomber attacks.
Similar tests were conducted in Minneapolis, Corpus Christi,
Texas, and Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
In another round of tests, in 1957 and 1958, the Army
released the particles from an airplane flying across the
Midwest. Collecting instruments on the ground at 175
weather stations in 39 states helped trace where the
particles landed. In some cases, the particles were detected
more than 1,000 miles from the release point.
Among the discoveries provided by the tests was that
random flights over a target area would disperse small
particles widely. The Army says the particles were harmless.
But some scientists warned them at the time that the tests
presented a potential health hazard.
The are several kinds of biological weapons that terrorists
would be expected to use. Anthrax is one of the main ones.
It?s a livestock disease caused by bacteria that form spores
that can live in the soil for decades. In a biological weapons
attack, anthrax would most likely be spread as a cloud of
spores. Such a cloud inhaled by a city?s residents would
create widespread flu-like symptoms, killing 80 percent of
those infected within one or two days after their symptoms
appear. Anthrax is not spread from person to person and is
not effective when dissolved in water, so it would not be
used to pollute a water supply. The disease has not been
seen in humans in the United States in 20 years, so even one
case would indicate that we had been attacked. Treatment
with antibiotics must begin before the flu-like symptoms
begin. Anthrax vaccine is currently available only to the
military and there is an extremely limited supply.
Smallpox is another possible weapon. The world has been free
of this disease since 1978, but some strains are still kept in
laboratories. The former Soviet Union reportedly stockpiled
large amounts of the virus for use in weapons. The virus is
easily spread from person to person. An aerosol release of
smallpox infecting only 50 people could unleash an epidemic
killing 30 percent of those infected with the painful,
disfiguring disease. Smallpox may take up to two weeks to
appear in infected people. The disease starts as a rash
resembling chicken pox. There is no known treatment for
smallpox. Vaccinations in the United States ceased almost 30
years ago, and people who were vaccinated then may no
longer be immune to the virus. The United States has limited
stores of the vaccine, and efforts are now under way to
develop new vaccines.
A third possibility is plague, which caused the Black Death
epidemics that killed large populations of Europeans in the
14th century. A few cases of bubonic plague still show up in
the southwestern United States, and in countries such as
India, every year. A biological terror attack would probably
involve the pneumonic form of plague and could kill up to 60
percent of those infected. If 100 pounds of Black Death
bacteria was released over a city of 5 million, about 150,000
people would contract the disease. More than 35,000 of
those would probably die. The Soviet Union produced massive
quantities of the bacteria for weapons use. After exposure,
victims begin to show symptoms of severe respiratory and
gastrointestinal problems. The disease can spread from
person to person.
The first sign of a biological attack might be rather mild.
People would start showing up at doctors? offices or hospital
emergency rooms with runny noses, teary eyes, headaches
and fevers. Only the sheer number of these patients, not the
severity of the initial symptoms, would suggest that
something unusual is going on. Over a period of days these
flu-like symptoms would turn into worse problems, such as
bleeding, internal and external lesions, and labored breathing.
This would provide the first proof of an attack on a civilian
population with biological weapons.
?In a worst-case scenario, a biological attack could be
considered the most horrible of all in terms of a hostile effort
against a population,? says Leonard Cole of Rutgers University
in Newark, New Jersey, author of The 11th Plague: The
Politics of Biological and Chemical Warfare. ?And that?s
because, at least theoretically, every person who becomes
infected, if it is with a certain kind of micro-organism, himself
becomes a biological weapon who can infect others, and you
get kind of a domino effect.?
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