Natural Health and Herbal Remedies Blog

BIOBOMBS: BEING PREPAREDAlthough terrorists would have to be on the duller side of the IQ curve to use biological weapons, it would be foolish for us to believe that such terrorists do not exist. We have been referring to terrorists as though they were fairly homogeneous with regard to their motivation, goals, intelligence, and rationality. We would be wise to prepare for heterogeneity. In this business it would take only one renegade to cause havoc. Such outlier terrorists may indeed use infectious weapons, and in so doing simultaneously demonstrate the clumsiness of infectious weapons and the self-destructive consequences for those who deploy them. It is a lose-lose situation for which we need to be prepared. The better prepared we are, the more clumsy the terrorist will appear.How can we prepare for an epidemic initiated by terrorists? The most obvious countermeasures are surveillance and interception. Although these strategies could effectively counter many of the threats, believing that they could provide complete protection is probably wishful thinking. Similarly, generating complete vaccination coverage for every possible infectious agent is probably both logistically and ethically unfeasible. Mandatory vaccination against smallpox, for example, would handicap or even kill a tiny percentage of those vaccinated; a tiny percentage of an enormous vaccinated population translates into a large number of people being harmed. Imposing this harm on people for an uncertain benefit would be ethically questionable and would probably be socially divisive over the long term.Fortunately, complete vaccination is probably not necessary to deter terrorism. Infectious weapons are poor terrorist weapons, and incremental increases in vaccination coverage make the infectious weapons incrementally poorer. Simply making the smallpox vaccine widely available for voluntary use would increase the percentage of people who would be immune to a smallpox terrorist attack. Informing the populace about the true threat of the smallpox virus as a terrorist weapon would increase this percentage further. If half the population chose to become vaccinated, the bang that the terrorist would achieve would be reduced by at least half, and perhaps by much more because with increasing vaccine coverage the infectious spread to the remaining susceptibles would be reduced. Making vaccines available for voluntary usage thus makes a poor-terrorist weapon even poorer. The poorer the weapon, the less likely it is to be used. The goal is to make the weapon so poor that even the terrorist with the lowest IQ can see that using it is not in his best interest.By making vaccines available on a voluntary basis, we would also be developing an infrastructure for vaccine preparation that would speed the response to a terrorist act. It would also vastly reduce the number of additional vaccinations that would be needed in the wake of an attack. If half the population is already vaccinated, the task of eradication of the pathogen would require fewer than half as many additional vaccinations than if no one were vaccinated.There is a simple reason we have seen frequent bombings and almost no infectious terrorism over the past century in spite of ready access to infectious agents. The terrorists are generally too smart to use them. After thinking about the consequences, they fall back on the tactics that create destruction and fear but leave open avenues for power and recognition to be gained by the terrorist organization in the wake of the damage. Bombing appears to be a preferred method because the human loss that occurs can be explained away as collateral damage, even though it may have been a primary goal. If a building is destroyed, the terrorist can always justify the act as an attack on the inequities of power. The bombing of the World Trade Center could be rationalized as an attack on a symbol of hedonistic capitalism. Such a rationalization may lower the outrage among the have-nots, who are envious of the wealth the building symbolizes. These bystanders may accept on some level the idea that the symbol was the primary target rather than the people. This cover will not work for infectious weapons, because they destroy people but leave the symbolic infrastructure intact.*54\225\2*

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