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The sudden outbreaks of anthrax make us
totally paranoid. While we couldn't call it an epidemic
yet, it all seems like a plot from a Tom Clancy novel.
The advantage of biological weapons, from a terrorist's
point of view, is you can't see, smell or hear them.
A disease like anthrax is easy to produce
and is very effective, and deadly, in an aerosol or powdered
form.
Antibiotics will kill the anthrax bacterium
but it's the anthrax toxin which really makes you ill.
The enzymes that make up the toxin lock onto the body's
cells, which think they're just friendly little proteins!
Once the toxin is inside the cells, it literally chews
them to pieces.
There's been reports of people buying up
ciprofloxacin antibiotics, which has prompted authorities
to issue warnings about suspect websites selling "cures".
The UK Times also reported that ciprofloxacin is currently
outselling Viagra on medical websites! Ciprofloxacin can
cause dizziness and nausea and can stop bone growth in
pregnant women and children. It can also cause severe
reactions in asthmatics taking Theophylline.
According to a report in Nature, Harvard
Medical School researchers have designed a drug that will
neutralize the toxin by stopping them from entering the
cells. Further studies are needed, but it looks promising.
But Jim Matthews, Associate Professor of
Pharmacy at Northeastern University says while anthrax
is scary, it's nothing compared with bubonic plague or
smallpox.
In 1995 an Ohio man bought a few vials of
bubonic plague from a laboratory in Maryland. The lab
became suspicious when he kept calling to see why it hadn't
arrived. This is the black plague we're talking about...the
one which killed millions of people in the 14th century.
Smallpox is another disease that's popular
with bioterrorists. This disfiguring and usually deadly
virus has all but vanished from the earth, except for
inside the freezers in high-containment laboratories at
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in
Atlanta and the Institute for Viral Preparations in Moscow.
A Somalian man was last known person to die from smallpox
in 1977.
There was a proposal by the World Health
Organization in the 90's to eliminate the last vials of
smallpox. This was met with fierce opposition from scientists
and politicians who debated whether we might need that
last sample to fight bioterrorism one day.
A wargame simulator called Dark Winter showed
that smallpox could kill 100,000 people in just five weeks.
Jim Matthews says there's evidence that
Iraq is developing smallpox as a weapon. "It's great
that federal officials are working to have the anthrax
antibiotic readily available for those believed to be
infected," said Matthews. "However, contingency
plans should be in the works to guard against other bioterrorist
threats such as smallpox."
The US government is currently negotiating
with biotech companies to increase the smallpox vaccine
stockpile to 300 million doses.
You can buy all sorts of diseases online
- all you need is a credit card, a credible letterhead,
and herpes and chlamydia could be yours...not that you'd
be able to infect a whole population with those. Biological
laboratories are thriving businesses in every sense of
the word and they are quite necessary as labs around the
world need bugs to experiment with - that's how we fight
disease.
But in the wrong hands, any lunatic or terrorist
with a vial of plague could potentially decimate a population.
And it's not just Bin Laden and his cult followers. Terrorists
lurk within. A religious cult in Oregon once poisoned
a salad bar with salmonella and made 750 people ill. A
1995 report by the U.S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee
on Investigations found that the head of the Aum Shinrikyo
cult and his followers, who were responsible for the sarin
nerve gas attacks in Japan, traveled to Zaire to collect
Ebola virus samples. There is no cure for Ebola - a disease
which literally melts your tissues.
The US
Department of Health and Human Services has invested
millions of dollars towards anti-bioterrorism which includes
vaccines and further research into likely bio-weapons.
The Germans plan to alert their citizens
of an impending germ attack via their mobile phones. Communications
experts are conducting tests on mass text message 'warnings'
and may include radio-controlled clocks, according to
the UK Guardian newspaper.
Being prepared is the best defense against
evil!
Here's an interesting site
on the history of smallpox.
The CDC also has a sobering article written in 1998 called
Bioterrorism
as a Public Health Threat.
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