News item: In October 2003, a small metal container found in an envelope in a postal handling facility in Greenville, SC, was determined to contain ricin. The accompanying letter complained about legislation regulating the trucking industry. No suspects have been identified.
A report released Dec. 11 by Trust for America’s Health found that after two years and nearly $2 billion of federal bioterrorism preparedness funding, the vast majority of states are only slightly better prepared to respond to bioterror emergencies than they were prior to 9/11. Florida, Maryland and Tennessee were found to be the most prepared. North Carolina was one of 13 states to receive a score of only five out of 10 possible indicators. The report said North Carolina has made progress to expand the health emergency communications network, upgrade public health laboratories and to develop initial bioterrorism response plans. The report also found that only Florida and Illinois are prepared to distribute and administer emergency vaccinations or antidotes from the national stockpile. The TFAH report is a valuable wake-up call for states and cities that want to be ready in case of a bioterror attack. What the report didn’t point out, however — and what few people in the US know — is that the greatest bioterrorism threats come from within our own borders.
In Iraq, a vial of harmless botulinium found in a scientist’s refrigerator is cited by American leaders as proof of an Iraqi biological weapons program, while in Charlotte women throw Botox parties where participants receive injections of a related toxin to smooth wrinkles.
In Texas, a university uses military funding to genetically engineer plants to produce the same deadly poison the US government accuses Al-Qaeda of wanting to use against us.
Meanwhile, two American health workers are killed by a vaccine against smallpox, a disease which should no longer exist; domestically produced anthrax spores terrorize the nation in one of history’s notable unsolved crimes; and advisors to the President tout the benefits of developing synthetic viruses that would target specific ethnic groups.
Welcome to the confounding and sometimes deadly area where public health and raw science meet national security and military secrecy. This shadowy world, which stretches from college campuses to the terror training camps of Afghanistan, is a conspiracy theorist’s dream. Although the subject is murky, what is becoming more clear as time passes is that the greatest danger to American citizens from bio-terrorism comes from the research and production of lethal bioweapons right here in the United States.
Homegrown Toxin
During his pre-war presentation to the United Nations Security Council while making the case that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a supposed imminent threat to world security, Secretary of State Colin Powell spent several minutes describing the deadly natural poison ricin, the production of which he alleged Al Qaeda operatives might have been exploring:
“Less than a pinch . . . of ricin, eating just this amount in your food, would cause shock followed by circulatory failure. Death comes within 72 hours and there is no antidote, there is no cure.”
When a few grams of ricin were discovered in Europe in 2002, the Continent was sent into a panic. Yet in Lubbock, TX, Texas Tech University scientists have quietly been working for almost a decade to breed two kinds of specialty castor beans, one of which would have very high levels of ricin. In addition, the university’s engineering department designed and built a machine to automate the extraction of ricin from plant matter. Texas Tech scientists have even developed a way that other plants — i.e., tobacco — could be genetically modified to produce ricin, and the school is willing to sell the technology, according to Texas Tech’s website.
With all these advances, it is now relatively easy to produce hundreds of kilos of deadly ricin off a small plot of castor beans. But why? There is no current practical use for ricin, and if one were to appear — say in a new legal drug — plenty could be harvested from normal castor beans using previously existing technology. It appears that the only rational reason for Texas Tech to spend all this time and money doing this is to make it easier to produce biological weapons.
“The effort at [Texas Tech] to develop ways to produce and use ricin involved a coordinated effort across several academic departments and activities that, if conducted in many countries, the US would consider proof of a weapons program,” points out a report from The Sunshine Project, a nongovernmental organization devoted to documenting and debunking secrets and myths about biological weapons. Texas Tech, as you may have gathered, has become a large center for secretive military-funded research on bioweapons, much of it done under the broad mantle of counterterrorism — and more than likely unacceptable under the world Biological Weapons Convention.
The creation of this technology is worthy of public debate, if not censure. After all, this stuff can boomerang back on us; consider that the deadly anthrax spores delivered through the mail in late 2001 were spawned from an anthrax strain originally produced in a US military lab.
Biodefense experts and former employees of the Army medical research institute at Maryland’s Ft. Detrick have charged that sloppy security procedures, disgruntled researchers and secret research could have provided the deadly combination that wrought terror and paranoia across the country during the post-9/11 anthrax scare. News reports also claimed that one alleged suspect, scientist Steven Hatfill, had commissioned a report for Science Applications International Corporation a couple years before the attacks on how to deal with an anthrax attack by mail.
“Some very expert field person would have been given this job [of studying the mailing of anthrax] and it would have been left to him to decide exactly how to carry it out,” Dr. Barbara Rosenberg, of the Federation of American Scientists, told the BBC last year. “The result might have been a project gone badly awry if he decided to use it for his own purposes.” The likely motive? Generating attention and budget funds for the biodefense industry — which they certainly accomplished.
While nobody has been charged with perpetrating the anthrax attacks, a clear profile of who could have done it has emerged. Col. David Franz, who was in charge of Ft. Detrick for 11 years through 1998, believes the anthrax attacks were carried out by a person or persons who knew their stuff. Franz told the BBC that the culprit would have needed a lot of experience to understand how to grow, purify and dry anthrax spores.
So why are we making this awful stuff? Less than one-millionth of a gram is a deadly dose, and it is prohibited by international conventions. Furthermore, the United States was supposed to have ended its production of biological weapons three decades ago. In fact, though, the line between “biodefense” and “bioweapons” is so blurry as to be nearly useless. Just days before 9/11, the New York Times reported that a military contractor called Battelle had actually been commissioned to create genetically altered anthrax.
Another secret project, according to Rosenberg, writing in the Los Angeles Times, “involved the construction of bomblets designed for dispersion of biological agents, although the Biological Weapons Convention explicitly prohibits developing a delivery system “designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes.'”
Rosenberg, a biodefense expert who believes the bioterror threat is increasing and that the American public is the most likely target, is frustrated that under the Bush administration, “the US has opposed every international effort to monitor the ban on the development and possession of biological weapons by states or to strengthen the toothless Biological Weapons Convention in any way.”
This is odd, since we were supposed to have the moral high ground when it came to Iraq, which had produced, according to President Bush, “more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents.”
This would make sense: The Commerce Department under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush had long permitted US companies to sell anthrax and other biological and chemical supplies to Iraq, the Senate Banking Committee has documented. If Iraq had used anthrax, these US companies and leaders would surely bear some of the responsibility for whatever tragedies might have ensued.
Big Threat From Smallpox
When, in the wake of 9/11, our president and noted “counterterrorism experts” decided to add a new bogeyman to the list of terrors we should worry about — the exterminated disease smallpox — it raised disturbing questions. Since the only known living smallpox virus was supposedly held by Russia and the United States, it would seem that somebody would have to really have goofed up for smallpox to have found its way into the hands of terrorists. Did the president know more than he was telling?
Chaotic, corrupt Russia was trotted out whenever smallpox came up in the media: Those poor Russian scientists might have sold some to al-Qaeda for some hard currency, reporters and experts said.
But if it wasn’t understood before, the anthrax attacks should have been a wake-up call that our own security surrounding these dangerous substances was lacking. An Associated Press report on Nov. 21 told the scary story of a vial of smallpox discovered sitting in an unlocked freezer “guarded” by an undergraduate lecturer.
The question few asked, even as close to 40,000 Americans — health and emergency workers, mostly — were subsequently vaccinated for smallpox at the government’s instruction, was whether the whole scare was an irresponsible, panicky reaction to the 9/11 attacks. Or, worse, a cynical attempt to increase our already soaring national fear levels. After all, the smallpox vaccine itself was known to be somewhat dangerous.
In fact, two women died after receiving the shots, killed by “adverse cardiac events” of a kind associated with the vaccine. Since then, the civilian program has basically ceased functioning, although the military continues to vaccinate soldiers; one died of a mysterious “lupus-like” disease in December after receiving the smallpox, anthrax and other vaccines on the same day.
Putting these tragedies aside, the questions remain: Did the threat demand this? Was there even a realistic threat at all? And who might have kept a smallpox strain and why? The World Health Organization had recommended that all virus stocks be destroyed by 1999, but this almost certainly did not happen. And while the virus was supposedly only held in two locations in the United States and Russia, it’s possible that other nations kept secret stashes of it taken in the years before it was eradicated in the populace. Donald Henderson, a science advisor to the US government, noted last month in the Independent that Iraq, Syria and Iran could theoretically have retained smallpox samples from a natural outbreak there in 1972. The government’s official position is simply that “the deliberate release of smallpox as an epidemic disease is now regarded as a possibility.” No smallpox samples have been discovered in Iraq.
Genetic Bio-Warfare Nightmare
Even as we fear the resurrection of one of the few plagues mankind has completely defeated, some of those who advise and work for President Bush have talked warmly of possibilities even more horrifying.
A decade ago, neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby who now occupy powerful positions in the White House wrote a draft policy paper that, among other calls for aggressively increasing US power in the world, argued that the government consider the development of biological weapons that “can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.”
Nobody who has been living through the astonishing medical and scientific advances of recent decades can doubt that such a horror might be possible. But to suggest we develop such diseases to add to our arsenal in defiance of international covenants and human decency is extraordinary, not to say abominable.
In December, the CIA convened a gathering of life sciences experts who warned that genetically engineered diseases “could be worse than any disease known to man.” The report generated by the scientists, “The Darker Bioweapons Future,” argues, “The same science that may cure some of our worst diseases could be used to create the world’s most frightening weapons.” They also noted the possibility that these monstrous creations could potentially be released secretly, and thus avoid any international “blowback.”
“One panelist cited the possibility of a stealth virus attack that could cripple a large portion of people in their 40s with severe arthritis, concealing its hostile origin and leaving a country with massive health and economic problems,” the report says.
Is this just more fear-mongering, or the sci-fi fantasies of a researcher who’s dependent on federal funds for his research? We won’t know for a while, of course, but just last month, scientist L. Craig Venter, one of the key players in the mapping of the human genome, posted on the Internet instructions for how to build a synthetic virus (he is working on the artificial creation of living organisms that could clean up pollution).
In any event, if such nightmares should come true, it is likely to be in the United States, the birthplace of bio-terrorism, which will have had the scientific ability, bureaucratic organization and research money needed to create them.
This article appears in Jan 14-20, 2004.
