Biological terrorism

DEFINITION: Spread of dangerous biological agents within civilian populations or agricultural areas with the intent of causing disorder and intense fear.

SIGNIFICANCE: A bioterrorist attack is perhaps one of the events most feared by emergency responders and government officials in the field of counterterrorism, in large part because, although the probability of a wide-scale attack is rather low, in the event of such an attack, the potential for catastrophic results is high.

Ever since the influenza pandemic of 1918–19 (a natural event), which killed some forty million people around the world, a heightened awareness has existed of the potential for the spread of harmful, even lethal, biological cultures among human populations. Among the purposeful biological attacks that have been perpetrated, perhaps the one with which the most Americans are familiar is the case in which letters containing the bacterium that causes anthrax were sent to addresses in New York City, Washington, DC, and Boca Raton, Florida, in October and November of 2001, shortly following the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This case greatly increased awareness of the need for government agencies (including the US Postal Service) to learn how to identify and respond effectively to any biological crisis. The outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Canada in 2002–3, which quickly spread from one to more than two hundred persons in Toronto-area hospitals and resulted in thirty-three deaths among patients and health workers, also demonstrated the need for improvements in government and health care responses to epidemic and pandemic disease outbreaks. The investigation and prevention of biological terrorism have become foremost components of nations’ efforts to improve their homeland security.

Bioterrorist attacks can target human populations directly or indirectly, through food and water supplies. Agroterrorism—biological terrorism that targets agricultural food sources—is a very real threat to national security in some countries because modern agricultural systems are tightly integrated, and many points in the harvesting, processing, and distribution systems represent potentially “soft” targets for terrorists and difficult targets to defend from terrorist acts. The routine transport and commingling of production and processing systems greatly aid the dissemination of any biological pathogens. It is estimated that about 70 percent of the value production in US agriculture occurs on just 5 percent of US farms, so a successful attack on any of these locations would be catastrophic.

History

The use of biological weapons can be easily traced back to ancient times. Soldiers used to dip their weapons in animal excrement or known plant toxins before battle so as to cause infection in whomever they stabbed or shot with arrows. In both ancient and medieval times, poisoning water supplies with dead animals was a favorite tactic, as was slinging or firing dead animal or human carcasses over defender walls in the hopes of spreading disease. Although few records exist to prove that European settlers in the New World purposely spread disease among Native Americans, sufficient evidence is found in the form of a letter from Colonel Henry Bouquet to Lord Jeffrey Amherst in 1763 to suggest that the British attempted to spread smallpox to their Native American opponents during the French and Indian War. Emperor Napoleon I drew on the expertise of French scientists to visit swamp fever on his opponents in the eighteenth century, and Confederate soldiers were known to poison ponds as they retreated from the advancing Union Army during the American Civil War.

By the time World War I began in 1914, science was sufficiently advanced that the mechanisms of the spread of disease were understood, and serious consideration was given to making use of biological agents during this global conflict. The German government formally and repeatedly refused to deploy biological agents against humans during the war, however, and the Allied Powers followed Germany’s lead in this regard. Nevertheless, German saboteurs deployed anthrax against horses and mules that were to be sent to Allied soldiers on the front lines. During World War II, as ample surviving film footage and written evidence shows, the Japanese tested biological agents extensively on Chinese prisoners and Chinese civilians. Whether the Japanese employed these agents as weapons of war, as some scholars allege, has not been proved. The Geneva Protocol, signed by various nations in 1925, outlaws the use of biological weapons, but such prohibitions are only as good as the resolve of nations to follow the protocol.

A number of terrorist organizations have at least discussed the use of biological weapons, including the Italian Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) and the German Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction), earlier known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Members of cults in the United States have poisoned restaurants with agents such as salmonella to cause sickness. The Japanese group Aum Shinrikyo (known as Aleph since 2000) actively acquired and cultured Bacillus anthracis (the bacterium that causes anthrax) and Ebola virus, both of which were found in significant quantities when police raided the group’s headquarters in 1995 following its sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. The group purportedly released botulinum toxin as well as anthrax in the same period, but these attempts were not successful. Experts are not sure why these attacks failed; possible reasons include the method of delivery, manufacturing problems, and that the group may have released an anthrax vaccine and a slowly reproducing botulinum toxin rather than more potent varieties of these pathogens.

Since 1996, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has opened numerous cases involving the potential use of biological agents. Many have amounted to mere threats, but some have included attempts to produce such pathogens as botulinum toxin, anthrax, and ricin.

Something which demonstrated the full, negative potential of biological weapons was not an actual attack but the COVID-19 pandemic. In the period between late 2019 through early 2023, close to seven million deaths worldwide were attributed to COVID-19. One of the many negative, second-order impacts was the proliferation of theories that suggested the illness originated as a bioweapon. Although these narratives were disproven by experts, the social and economic havoc wrought by COVID-19 served to illustrate the immense damage an actual bioweapon could potentially create.

COVID-19 has indeed served to reinvigorate international interest in combating biological terrorism. In November 2022, the pandemic was a topic of renewed concern at the United Nations Biological Weapons Convention held in Geneva, Switzerland. Various officials commented that the pandemic made it necessary for the Biological Weapons Convention to be updated.

Types of Agents

Because the variety of biological agents available for use in terrorist acts is quite extensive, stockpiling vaccines that may be needed in the event of biological attacks is extremely difficult; it is virtually impossible to have safeguards in place against every potential type of biological agent. Some of the most dangerous pathogens that may potentially be used by bioterrorists, as categorized by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are anthrax, pneumonic plague, botulinum toxin, smallpox, and ricin.

Anthrax is perhaps the biological pathogen most likely to be used in a bioterrorist attack. It is relatively easy to cultivate the spores of B. anthracis, and the spores are fairly stable under a variety of conditions, so dissemination of the pathogen is not particularly difficult. When inhaled, the agent works into the lungs and causes fever, shock, and, ultimately, death. Anthrax can also cause sores on the skin of people working with infected livestock, which can result in other bodily infections. Approximately ten thousand spores of B. anthracis must be inhaled to prove deadly, but a mere gram of the bacterium contains millions of lethal doses.

The possibility of the use of pneumonic plague in a biological attack is high on the list of such threats maintained by first responders because this disease is incredibly virulent. Its killing potential in an uninoculated population is extremely high, close to 90 percent, and lethal exposure requires far fewer spores (around three thousand) than does anthrax. Pneumonic plague first appears as a fever accompanied by coughing, which progresses into hemorrhaging in the lungs. If left untreated for a relatively short period, the disease is almost always fatal.

Botulinum toxin is also fairly easy to cultivate. The potential of this toxin for use in aerosol form makes it very attractive as a biological weapon because the pathogen can be spread rapidly over a wide area. Botulinum toxin attacks the muscle nerves, paralyzing the nerve endings and preventing the muscles from responding to the brain. The paralysis begins near the head and works its way down through the body.

Smallpox is considered to be high on the list of potential bioterrorism pathogens because many people in the United States and around the world are no longer immunized against the disease, ever since aggressive vaccination programs let to its global eradication, which was verified and announced in December, 1979. The Variola major virus, which causes the most deadly form of smallpox, is relatively easy to cultivate and is easily spread using aerosols. Smallpox is contracted through inhalation, and after it incubates, the infected person normally experiences headache, fever, and other common signs of the flu. Next a rash develops, followed by pus-filled bumps on the skin. The mortality rate is approximately 30 percent for victims who have not been inoculated.

Ricin is a toxic protein found in castor beans; it is extracted from the waste produced in the manufacture of castor oil. Ricin is relatively easy to acquire and also much easier to stockpile than most other biological pathogens. A large dose is required to kill, but the toxin can be either ingested or inhaled. When employed in conjunction with other pathogens, ricin can enable other pathogens to attack an already afflicted body. Ricin can cause respiratory problems, fever, cough, abdominal pain, and, when ingested, damage to organs such as the liver and kidneys. Ricin prevents cells in the body from making protein, which causes the cells to die off.

Methods of Investigation

Perhaps the greatest difficulty in the investigation of biological attacks is the fact that many of the initial symptoms caused by intentionally introduced agents are very similar to the symptoms of common diseases, such as influenza. Most often, the only way first responders are even aware that a biological attack has potentially taken place is the presence of a massive influx of people with the same symptoms. Such attacks are not usually discovered until after the pathogens have been widely disseminated and have infected large numbers of people.

The teams that investigate biological attacks need to include persons with knowledge of both biology and chemistry, who can understand the interplay between the body and the pathogen. Other areas of knowledge that are extremely important in the investigation of such attacks include the disciplines of anthropology and geography. An understanding of human living, interaction, and moving patterns, combined with meteorological data, can help investigators to track a disease back to where it may have originated, particularly in the case of aerosol dissemination.

Much of the investigative strategy used in determining whether biological agents have been intentionally spread involves the review of medical diagnoses and the employment of effective vaccines against the various agents. Investigators usually trace such agents back to their sources by comparing strains of genetic material with a database that catalogs various strains and the laboratories or environments in which the strains originated. Many materials used in the manufacture of biological agents are sold commercially, and investigators try to track where such materials may have been purchased and by whom. Scientists have been working on developing a system of biological agent detection that will be able to identify pathogens through size, nucleic acid sequence, and antigen recognition.

It is clear that the modern world has seen neither the end of bioterrorist activities nor the full range of bioterrorism possibilities yet displayed. It is equally certain that just as formal counterterrorism measures evolve and successfully propagate, so will the methods, means, and modes of bioterrorism.

Bibliography

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