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

Klotz, Lynn C.; Sylvester, Edward J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226444058 ISBN 13: 9780226444055

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226444058
• ISBN 13: 9780226444055
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 260
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar