The risk of bioterrorism is not about to go away, but it has to be kept in perspective, said participants in a conference Friday.
The meeting, "Bioterrorism: Science, Security and Preparedness," was organized by a pair of graduate students — Rebecca Katz, who studies the politics of biological weapons in the Wilson School, and Scott Steele, who works in molecular biology.
The response to last fall's anthrax attacks has translated into a huge increase in support for biodefense research, said Jack Killen, assistant director for biodefense research at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a unit of the National Institutes of Health.
The president requested a total of $5.9 billion for bioterrorism preparedness in next year's budget, Killen said. NIH's biodefense research program is slated to receive $1.75 billion, up from less than $275 million this year, he said.
Killen explained that NIH's research will focus on ways to deal with "Category A" biological agents — a list of the most dangerous known diseases. These agents are both lethal and easy to spread, he said, and they include such age-old human scourges as smallpox and the plague, along with anthrax.
One goal of the new research will be to screen existing medicines for effectiveness against bioterrorism agents, to get away from a "one bug, one drug" strategy that requires the use of special treatments in response to a particular type of bioterror attack, Killen said.
Using existing drugs, when possible, is easier than deploying special treatments during an emergency, he said.
Nonetheless, Killen said that the main effect of last year's anthrax mailings was to produce disruption and fear — not death. The attacks produced just 23 cases of anthrax, of which five were fatal, he said. "If you step back from the last year, the threat we need to be worried about in terms of infection is the natural threat," he said.
He pointed to the reemergence of AIDS, West Nile, Lyme disease and drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis and malaria as major areas of concern.
Using disease as a weapon is not a new idea, noted Stephen Morse, director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness at Columbia University's school of public health. It has been successfully used not only recently, but throughout history, he said.
In 1346, Mongol warriors threw plague-infested corpses over the walls of the city of Caffa, triggering a pandemic the next year. And during the colonization of America, Lord Jeffery Amherst gave blankets laced with smallpox to Native Americans, he said.
Summarizing the day's events, molecular biology professor Lee Silver said biological weapons are easily accessible.
"It could be widely available to non-state actors," he said. "The reagents can be obtained."
Nonetheless, Silver added, the most likely biological attacks produce more fear than death. "Bioterrrorism is a weapon of mass disruption," he said.
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