Breeding Bio Insecurity: How U.S. Biodefense Is Exporting Fear, Globalizing Risk, and Making Us All Less Secure - Rilegato

Klotz, Lynn C.; Sylvester, Edward J.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0226444058 ISBN 13: 9780226444055

Casa editrice: Univ of Chicago Pr, 2009

Riassunto

In the years since the 9/11 attacks—and the subsequent lethal anthrax letters—the United States has spent billions of dollars on measures to defend the population against the threat of biological weapons. But as Lynn C. Klotz and Edward J. Sylvester argue forcefully in Breeding Bio Insecurity, all that money and effort hasn’t made us any safer—in fact, it has made us more vulnerable.

Breeding Bio Insecurity reveals the mistakes made to this point and lays out the necessary steps to set us on the path toward true biosecurity. The fundamental problem with the current approach, according to the authors, is the danger caused by the sheer size and secrecy of our biodefense effort. Thousands of scientists spread throughout hundreds of locations are now working with lethal bioweapons agents—but their inability to make their work public causes suspicion among our enemies and allies alike, even as the enormous number of laboratories greatly multiplies the inherent risk of deadly accidents or theft. Meanwhile, vital public health needs go unmet because of this new biodefense focus. True biosecurity, the authors argue, will require a multipronged effort based in an understanding of the complexity of the issue, guided by scientific ethics, and watched over by a vigilant citizenry attentive to the difference between fear mongering and true analysis of risk.

An impassioned warning that never loses sight of political and scientific reality, Breeding Bio Insecurity

is a crucial first step toward meeting the evolving threats of the twenty-first century.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Lynn C. Klotz is senior science fellow with the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Edward J. Sylvester is a science journalist and the author of three books on cutting-edge medical research, as well as the highly acclaimed The Gene Age, in which he and Lynn Klotz introduced lay audiences to the emerging biotechnology revolution.

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BREEDING BIO INSECURITY

How U.S. Biodefense Is Exporting Fear, Globalizing Risk, and Making Us All Less SecureBy LYNN C. KLOTZ EDWARD J. SYLVESTER

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2009 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-44405-5

Contents

Acknowledgments..............................................vii1 Dangerous Crossing.........................................12 A Future Bright and Dark...................................173 A Hawk Turns to Peace, Doves Go to War.....................394 Devils We've Known.........................................595 Paranoia Begets Permissiveness.............................816 Dangerous Acquaintances....................................1097 Who's Minding the Store?...................................1338 All Roads Must Lead to Public Health.......................1519 Down to Grass Roots........................................17510 Acting Globally...........................................193Notes........................................................219Index........................................................253

Chapter One

Dangerous Crossing

In the autumn of 1347, a Mongol army attacked the Italian trading outpost at Caffa in the Crimea. While laying siege to the city, the invaders began to die in large numbers from an unknown but incredibly virulent disease. That ended the attack, but legend has it that before the Mongols departed, they catapulted the bodies of victims into the city in what would be, if true, one of the world's deadliest—and therefore most successful—uses of biological warfare.

When the siege survivors arrived in Messina, Sicily, legend ends and history begins. Those who greeted them were horrified to find the sailors dead or dying at their oars from a disease that hideously blackened their skin and caused egg-sized bleeding pustules—or buboes—to form in their armpits and groins. Soon the onlookers became victims, then those who cared for the onlookers, then those who buried the caregivers. So began Europe's bubonic plague that would kill half the populations of its largest metropolises—Paris, Florence, and Venice. Striking equally across social classes, it would change dynasties, reshape social life and trade, and alter history in ways we can never know.

Within a few years, the plague killed a third of the continent's population and a similar percentage in a swath ranging from China to India, through the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, all the way to the Middle Eastern Levant, each offering yet another port of entry to Europe's crowded cities. It devastated the entire known world. And if it marked the first European encounter with biowarfare, it certainly would not be the last.

At each successive step, the perpetrators of biological warfare grew more knowing. When the British outpost of Fort Pitt was threatened by Delaware tribesmen in 1763 during the French and Indian War, the defenders distributed blankets and handkerchiefs that had been used by smallpox patients among the natives—a telling reversal of roles from the Caffa siege. That much was recorded by one of the fort commanders. The entire American Indian population ultimately was devastated by smallpox, though it had already been destroying native populations for two centuries by the time it was used at Fort Pitt. Three decades later, Dr. Edward Jenner created the vaccine that brought smallpox to bay in the developed world.

From then on, as the science of microbiology advanced, biowarfare crept forward in its shadow. During World War I, the Germans attempted to kill Allied mules and horses by infecting them with laboratory strains of anthrax and glanders, both bacterial diseases, in order to disrupt military supply lines. It was mostly unsuccessful and had no effect on the Allied war effort. In World War II, the Japanese killed tens of thousands of defenseless Chinese in occupied Manchuria over a period of years in perhaps hundreds of "experiments" with plague, cholera, and other deadly bacteria sprayed from airplanes, put into food and water wells, and injected directly into victims. Given the Chinese victims truly were defenseless, tens of thousands of deaths is not surprising or even evidence of the mass killing power of bioweapons.

But in the twenty-first century, all prior efforts could be dwarfed by creations of "the new biology": the marriage of molecular biology, which has brought profound understanding of the molecules of life, and biotechnology, its practical complement. The discoveries and creations announced daily that lead us toward a world of miracle cures and preventatives may bring, in lockstep, arrays of bioweapons powerful enough to quite literally hijack our minds and bodies. A most important truth of historical biowarfare is not the devastation it accomplished, but its limitations.

When physicists exploded the first nuclear bomb at Alamogordo in 1945, they witnessed a horror no human had ever seen. In sharp contrast, earlier bioweapons never were a match for natural diseases, which can approach the horror of even nuclear weapons. The 1918 influenza pandemic killed forty million people worldwide, far more than died in World War I. When smallpox was eradicated from Earth thirty years ago, a scourge ended that over the centuries had killed and maimed hundreds of millions of people and destroyed over half of populations lacking resistance.

Moreover, though sometimes dramatic and immediately successful, biowarfare attacks of the past simply struck an enemy with diseases that either were well known and sometimes endemic, as in the Japanese experiments, or that were already on the march. The plague introduced with such lethal effect at Messina already hovered at Europe's borders and soon stormed in from everywhere. Smallpox carried by Europeans had been killing native populations unintentionally before the British struck with it at Fort Pitt. Historic biowarfare was hit or miss.

Now imagine the monumental history of natural biological disaster repeating in warfare, the agents delivered not clumsily but with the full force of natural pandemics, their delivery and even their lethality radically enhanced by science. That kind of attack would strike like a hurricane that has built up power over the ocean, sweeping in with predictable malevolence but unimaginable force. That energy-rich ocean—a wilderness as full of promise and danger as any ever explored—is the new biology. It is impossible to talk about the dangers inherent in biowarfare without looking toward the new knowledge of microbes and human defenses gained over the past half century, and it is equally impossible to talk about the wonders of modern genetics and drug discovery without attending to their dark potentials.

If that weren't enough, it is equally impossible to discuss the dangers of human-manipulated organisms without conjuring the complex natural world of evolving microbes such as avian flu virus, which threaten evermore havoc as we invade their natural reservoirs and unwittingly spread them throughout the globe.

How to engage these problems in the ways needed to reach an attainable level of security against all these biological threats is the theme of Breeding Bio Insecurity. Biosecurity is as complex as all this implies. There are no simple solutions. There are realistic strategies that can reduce the threats. And most important, in many cases our government strategies take us directly away from them toward the dangerous future just portrayed.

Haste

In the years following 9/11, the United States has poured out billions of dollars for massive expansion of high-biosecurity labs and has encouraged universities and private sources to build them. The irresistible lure is millions in research funding to develop countermeasures for weapons feared to be on the horizon, the goal to build walls of protection against bioterrorism or the full-scale biowarfare that might be waged by rogue nations. And though reacting to those frightening prospects, at the same time the government has clamped a lid of security on such work, sometimes accompanied by draconian punishments for violators.

Intuitively, all that may seem an unfortunate but necessary response in the aftermath of terror. Americans have good reason to be apprehensive about bioterror and other forms of "asymmetrical warfare." First came the shock of 9/11, witnessed in real time by perhaps a billion people around the world. On its heels just weeks later, the anthrax attacks left five people dead, more permanently injured, and all of us with foreboding that this was just a whisper of what true biowarfare might bring at any moment. The government struck back with unprecedented intensity and haste to fix blame, seek revenge, and cobble together a monumental biodefense program. And that is the heart of the problem. Intuition in the heat of disaster is not a good shaper of policy for the most powerful nation in the world dealing with one of the most complex issues of our time—nor would it be for any nation at any time.

On balance, we may be less biosecure than before the 2001 attacks. Our bloated, largely secret biodefense program increases the risk of accidents and theft by terrorists, and its lack of transparency may be inadvertently fueling an international arms race in bioweapons. The danger of starting a pandemic from the escape of deadly viruses from a lab may far exceed the medical benefits that might accrue. Much-needed oversight of dangerous activities is insufficient or nonexistent.

And as fearful as science-enhanced biological warfare would be, the likelihood of massive attacks by rogue nations or terrorists is low, now and for years to come, and does not warrant the enormous concentration of resources to protect ourselves at any cost that appears to be the goal of U.S. biodefense policy. More seriously, that policy makes the onset of such biowarfare more likely than it otherwise would be. Consider that anomaly, for you will see the evidence of it mount up chapter by chapter—evidence we believe far outweighs the countervailing claims of other biosecurity experts we will discuss.

Buying a Deadlier Future?

Perhaps a quarter of the nearly $50 billion in the U.S. biodefense program goes to research and develop bioweapons countermeasures like antibiotics, antivirals, antidotes, and vaccines, in a rush to protect us from bioterrorism. Testing them clearly requires ready availability of the bioweapons agents themselves. On the other hand, the very presence of agents like weaponized anthrax and plague in hundreds of high-biosecurity labs is, just as clearly, an open invitation to theft.

To garner shares of the countermeasure funding, a swelling cadre of academic scientists is beating a path to research Earth's deadliest microbes and toxins to see how they kill in order to develop countermeasures. The government's goal is defense. Because such work requires highly protective environments, the would-be developers have rushed to build or refocus hundreds of laboratories of a type known as Biosafety Level 3. Biological safety is rated on a scale in which the top level, 4, demands the most extreme precautions, required in order to work on the deadliest microbes, whose escape could have the direst consequences. There are now over one thousand BSL-3 labs registered to work on "select agents," maybe several hundred of them working with bioweapons agents. The United States plans for even more BSL-4 labs; there are already fifteen operational or nearly so, up from only four a few years ago. The tales of errors that have already occurred with deadly microbes in BSL-3 labs and other settings are hair-raising. Whatever inherent dangers they pose, how those hazards increase with proliferation is easy to demonstrate.

If the risk of a deadly microbe's being lost, stolen, or somehow escaping from one BSL-3 lab at the historic bioweapons research facility of Fort Detrick, Maryland, was x, what is the danger of that mishap when there are more than a thousand such laboratories? An immediate answer would be at least a thousand times x, but it is actually likely to be much greater, because most of the new labs will be staffed by personnel relatively untrained in handling deadly microbes.

Richard Ebright, a professor in the prestigious Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University, says that security measures are not nearly tight enough to protect against theft of organisms. Ebright noted, "If al-Qaeda wished to carry out a bioweapons attack in the U.S., their simplest means of acquiring access to the materials and the knowledge would be to send individuals to train within programs involved in biodefense research." Regarding background checks, he points out that "[9/11 mastermind] Mohammed Atta would have passed those tests without difficulty."

Wages of Fear

These federal biodefense activities in the name of security in fact are putting all of us at ever-greater risk. We are at greater risk in our neighborhoods, and we are at greater risk internationally of being perceived as aggressors.

James Leonard, Richard Spertzel, and Milton Leitenberg, three of the country's most respected experts on the state of biosecurity in the world today, warn: "The rapidity of elaboration of American biodefense programs, their ambition and administrative aggressiveness, and the degree to which they push against the prohibitions" of the long-standing international agreement against developing biological weapons "are startling."

The three have established and impressive U.S. biosecurity credentials, two for work with the government. James Leonard was the ambassador who headed the U.S. delegation in forging the international agreement, the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), during the Nixon administration, and Dr. Richard Spertzel was former deputy director of the famed U.S. Army Medical Institute on Infectious Diseases—a unit whose vision is to be America's leading research laboratory in "providing cutting-edge medical research for the warfighter against biological threats." The third is Professor Milton Leitenberg, senior research scholar at the University of Maryland's Center for International and Security Studies. He notes that if the United States observed any other country engaged in or simply planning the kinds of biodefense effort that $50 billion is buying, we would judge that country to be violating the BWC, the prohibition against bioweapons development that has stood for more than thirty years.

President Richard M. Nixon, renouncing the development of offensive biological weapons in a move that led to adoption of the BWC, said that mankind "already carries in its hands too many seeds of its own destruction." He felt that biological warfare had "massive, unpredictable, and potentially uncontrollable consequences" and biological weapons were "repugnant to the conscience of mankind."

However repugnant, we are courting the disease itself in the name of prevention. The risk of an international biological arms race launched by the obsessive secrecy that is the U.S. norm can only compound whatever threat is already out there. How better to launch such an arms race than to give every appearance of starting one yourself while keeping others in the dark?

We are charging down this dangerous path out of contradictory motivations that can only be self-defeating. The government is paranoid over potential bioterrorism while being permissive toward those whose work might well fuel it. Paranoia is a keystone in our government's political policy of instilling fear to maintain an image of being strong on terror. This policy has created an illogical fear of a massive terrorist attack with biological or chemical weapons. At the same time, billions in biodefense funding have been made available—with billions more planned—with little thought to consequences, to entice scientists to develop countermeasures to protect us from a massive biological weapons attack that may never come. With little control or even oversight over how this money will be spent, we are creating a permissive atmosphere for unthinking scientists to dream up whatever research with dangerous pathogens might help them get the money. And all that makes public fear warranted, though hardly in the ways intended.

Steering Clear of Danger

If so much of the U.S. effort is wrong-headed, how do we achieve biosecurity in this century of the new biology? That will mean security against classical biological weapons and hostile exploitation of the new biology; security from emerging and reemerging pandemic flu, antibiotic-resistant infections, and ever-present infectious diseases; and, hardest to articulate, security against yet-undiscovered threats.

A number of strategies now in play or on the horizon would increase biosecurity, most obviously research and development (R&D) on biological weapons agents and countermeasures and, as we will argue, even greater efforts that should be waged against natural infectious diseases. But equally critical goals include preventing the hostile exploitation of biology, from ongoing international efforts toward treaties and agreements to grassroots activities such as developing ethical awareness in scientists. Finally, in order to reduce the risk of an arms race in bioweapons, efforts to bring international oversight and transparency to biodefense activities and dangerous research are crucial.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from BREEDING BIO INSECURITYby LYNN C. KLOTZ EDWARD J. SYLVESTER Copyright © 2009 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Univ of Chicago Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0226444058
• ISBN 13: 9780226444055
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 260
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile