Experts Paint Dire Picture of Bioterrorism Threat
By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON - The knowledge needed to engineer new weapon-usable biological
agents is common around the world, and the United States must seek the proper balance between agility of response and countermeasure stockpiling in defending against biological terrorism, experts told a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee this morning (see GSN, July 6).
U.S. efforts to defend against known threats, such as the Strategic National Stockpile of countermeasures, have some utility, said Molecular Sciences Institute Director Roger Brent. However, they may represent a "Maginot Line" that terrorists could simply circumvent by using new pathogens, or existing ones not addressed by the stockpile, he told the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Prevention of Nuclear and Biological Attack.
Brent said terrorists faced with a U.S. stockpile of the antibiotic Ciproflaxin, for example, would be certain, if mounting an anthrax attack, to employ a variety of the bacteria that was resistant to Ciproflaxin.
Programs to protect against known threats are not "bad things," Brent added, but "what's going to come at you is impossible to predict."
The threat is underscored by the wide dissemination of biological-engineering knowledge around the globe, Brent said.
"There are now tens of thousands of people who could engineer drug-resistant anthrax," said the scientist, who as a consultant to the U.S. government has received numerous briefings on U.S. and Soviet biological weapon programs.
George Mason University professor Kenneth Alibek, a top official in the Soviet Union's biological weapon program before defecting to the United States in 1992, concurred that there is no shortage of knowledge that terrorists could exploit in mounting a biological attack.
"The knowledge is there," Alibek told the subcommittee. "Whether or not they are developing this, they don't publish - but they can."
Massachusetts General Hospital Biodefense and Mass Casualty Care Director Michael Callahan suggested a few potential "chokepoints" at which the United States could seek to monitor or disrupt terrorists' biological weapon efforts.
Washington could focus on the trade in certain chemicals useful for making pathogens more deadly, he said, or on products and technologies, such as vaccines, that could be used to protect people against biological agents with which they are working.
Brent expressed skepticism about such approaches, stressing that the market for such products is diffuse and worldwide.
"You wish there were more chokepoints," he said. "I'm not convinced that there are very good chokepoints."
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON - The knowledge needed to engineer new weapon-usable biological
agents is common around the world, and the United States must seek the proper balance between agility of response and countermeasure stockpiling in defending against biological terrorism, experts told a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee this morning (see GSN, July 6).
U.S. efforts to defend against known threats, such as the Strategic National Stockpile of countermeasures, have some utility, said Molecular Sciences Institute Director Roger Brent. However, they may represent a "Maginot Line" that terrorists could simply circumvent by using new pathogens, or existing ones not addressed by the stockpile, he told the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Prevention of Nuclear and Biological Attack.
Brent said terrorists faced with a U.S. stockpile of the antibiotic Ciproflaxin, for example, would be certain, if mounting an anthrax attack, to employ a variety of the bacteria that was resistant to Ciproflaxin.
Programs to protect against known threats are not "bad things," Brent added, but "what's going to come at you is impossible to predict."
The threat is underscored by the wide dissemination of biological-engineering knowledge around the globe, Brent said.
"There are now tens of thousands of people who could engineer drug-resistant anthrax," said the scientist, who as a consultant to the U.S. government has received numerous briefings on U.S. and Soviet biological weapon programs.
George Mason University professor Kenneth Alibek, a top official in the Soviet Union's biological weapon program before defecting to the United States in 1992, concurred that there is no shortage of knowledge that terrorists could exploit in mounting a biological attack.
"The knowledge is there," Alibek told the subcommittee. "Whether or not they are developing this, they don't publish - but they can."
Massachusetts General Hospital Biodefense and Mass Casualty Care Director Michael Callahan suggested a few potential "chokepoints" at which the United States could seek to monitor or disrupt terrorists' biological weapon efforts.
Washington could focus on the trade in certain chemicals useful for making pathogens more deadly, he said, or on products and technologies, such as vaccines, that could be used to protect people against biological agents with which they are working.
Brent expressed skepticism about such approaches, stressing that the market for such products is diffuse and worldwide.
"You wish there were more chokepoints," he said. "I'm not convinced that there are very good chokepoints."
