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Bioterror: a ticking time bomb

By Peter Curson - posted Friday, 12 May 2017


There is little doubt that the release of a biological agent into an Australian community would be a disaster and would raise a host of questions that lie at the very heart of life and public health.

While Australia has a range of Emergency Management Plans for epidemics and disasters, a wide range of critical questions are not well addressed. These include, to whom limited supplies of vaccine might be delivered and how this might be achieved.

Such plans also tell us very little about civil rights and liberties during times of biological crisis or how human reaction, fear and hysteria might be addressed.

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Bioterrorism remains a crucial issue for our world. Research in science and biotechnology over the last decade has enabled not only advances in medicine and public health, but has also increased the availability of a wide range of pathogens as well as technologies that can be used to spread disease agents among vulnerable populations.

Since terrorists attacked the US on September 11 2001 our attention has been increasingly drawn to the risk of a bioterror incident. The cornerstone of US efforts to prevent the proliferation and use of biological weapons rests with the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) which banned the development, production, acquisition and use of biological weapons.

Over the last 45 years the BWC has been successfully undermined by numerous violations and by its failure to enlist the support of all nations. The Soviets, for example, have had a major biological weapons program for many years maintaining some of the world’s largest and most advanced bioweapons facilities housing a number of virulent viruses including smallpox, anthrax and ebola.

North Korea also has had an active biological weapons program, stockpiling many biochemical agents including mustard gas, sarin and anthrax. By 2016 North Korea is thought to have stockpiled up to 5,000 tons of biochemical agents including mustard gas, sarin and anthrax.

Equally disturbing is the fact that many developing countries have poorly secured biological laboratories and bio-culture holdings. Despite this, a major hurdle for terrorists seeking to obtain biological weapons remains the difficulty of acquiring such agents. Although some dangerous pathogens such as anthrax can be isolated from natural sources, it remains much simpler for terrorists or rogue states to simply buy or steal such material.

 Concern over the release of a biological agent has heightened in recent years. The sarin incident in the Tokyo subway, the anthrax incident in the US, the ricin incident in Britain, the widespread use of chemical weapons during the Iraq-Iran war and in March and April of this year when Isis launched two biochemical attacks in Mosul, are all examples.

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Further, a laptop captured from an Isis base in North Syria contained detailed plans of how terrorists in Syria and Iraq were investigating the use of bubonic plague as a bioterrorist agent. Many now believe that a bioterrorist attack against a large urban population is inevitable.

While the likelihood of such an incident may seem remote in New Zealand or Australia, some believe that it is simply a matter of time before we are confronted by such an event. The impact of such an attack was vividly brought home by the US Dark Winter Project in 2001 which modelled the effects of a covert aerosol release of smallpox in three US shopping malls. Within two months it was estimated that there could be more than three million cases of smallpox and one million deaths.

But why smallpox, when the disease was eradicated many years ago? Well, it would appear that a number of countries continue to retain stocks of the disease and some have experimented to produce more lethal varieties.

A terrorist group having obtained stocks of smallpox or anthrax would face the task of delivering it to a vulnerable population. In the case of Australia a possible scenario involves a single aerosol pathogen such as anthrax or smallpox, delivered by a motorised van using an improvised spraying device, or perhaps the release of an aerosol agent from a small boat into the prevailing wind in the harbour of one of our major towns or cities relying on air movements to transport it over adjacent suburbs.

Many people vaccinated against smallpox more than 40 years ago might still retain some degree of immunity but what about the bulk of the population? Given that we still have limited supplies of smallpox vaccine who would/should be offered immediate vaccination and where would we place infected people now that Quarantine Stations have ceased to exist?  Would we requisition schools, bowling greens, race courses and other buildings as temporary hospitals as happened during the 1918-19 flu pandemic?

Today, anthrax is considered to be an ideal bioterrorist agent because it is relatively easy to grow and highly lethal when inhaled. The US incident some years ago simply involved envelopes containing anthrax sent via the US mail to people in the media and later to two US Senators. Within two months, 22 people, including a number of postal workers, had contracted anthrax and five had died. In 1995 a Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo released anthrax spores from the roof of a building in Tokyo. Fortunately the attack failed because the cult had unknowingly produced and released a harmless strain of anthrax.

Food and agricultural terrorism is another area of concern. In this case, like bioterrorism generally, it is not about killing people but more about crippling a country’s economy and instilling fear and hysteria and creating panic.

Over the last few decades there have been a number of examples of attempts to contaminate agricultural or food products with biological or chemical agents. In 1984, for example, the Raineeshee cult in Oregon, concerned about new development regulations, deliberately contaminated food in 10 restaurants with a form of Salmonella hoping to make people too sick to vote. In total more than 750 people were affected and 45 required hospitalisation.

While Australia has one of the world’s best animal health surveillance systems there are some areas of concern.  

One of these concerns the surveillance and data gathering from many of the remotest cattle properties in Northern Australia.

Another possibility is the use of a biological agent widespread in parts of Australia and easily obtained and disseminated. Q fever is one example. A zoonotic disease that circulates among its natural animal host, the disease is endemic in parts of Australia where it is closely linked to the livestock industry. The disease agent survives for lengthy periods in dust and animal litter and in humans can produce an acute, largely self-limiting flu-like illness lasting for up to one month. Such a pathogen, easily obtainable, is highly infectious and could easily be spread with nothing more than a common commercial sprayer. While the disease would not produce any deaths, the fear and panic that it would engender would be considerable.

There is little doubt that the release of a biological agent into an unsuspecting Australian population would be a disaster and would give rise to a host of security challenges that go to the very heart of our society.  The prospect of such an event is a chilling reminder of the world we live in.

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About the Author

Peter Curson is Emeritus Professor of Population and Health in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Macquarie University.

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