Biowarfare

First lets start off with a short historical overview.

• 1346  During the siege of Caffa, the Tartars catapulted bodies of comrades who’d died of the plague into the city. Fleeing residents brought the plague throughout Europe and this led to the second epidemic of Black Death in Europe.

• During the French and Indian War, the British general at Fort Pitt ordered smallpox infected blankets be given to the Delaware Indians.

• WWI  Germans infected cattle shipped from neutral countries to allies with anthrax.

• WWII  The Japanese killed as many as 10,000 people in experiments. They dropped bags full of plague-infected-fleas in inhabited Chinese cities and outbreaks occurred.

• Cold War  US and Russia had programs to develop bioweapons. In the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention, they decided only to do defensive research, but this was only the beginning of research in the USSR. In Sverdlovsk, the accidental release of anthrax by a military base killed 70 people.

• Iraq had a program since 1985, as reported by a UNSCOM team, and they developed and stockpiled weapons.

• 1985  Salmonella was used to prevent citizens from voting in a local election. There were over 50 cases of food poisoning, and 45 people required hospitalization.

• 1995  Release of Sarin gas in a subway in Japan. The same group tried 10 times between 1993 and 1995 to spray anthrax in Tokyo. There were no fatalities because they used an avirulent strain and didn’t refine the particle size enough.

• Anthrax letters were mailed to Tom Brokaw and others. 22 got sick, 5 died. We don’t know who did it, but they must have had an ability to weaponize anthrax.

The CDC categorized different organisms with the potential to be weapons into two groups:

1. Group A High Priority, a risk to national security, easily disseminated and transmitted p2p, High mortality rates. Might cause public panic and socail disruption, and requires special action for public health prepaqredness, The category includes bacteria and viruses. Anthrax, Botulism, plague, smallpox, tularemia, viral hemorrhagic fevers.

2. Group B  moderately easy to disseminate, moderate morbidity rate, and lower mortality rate. Require enhancements of CDC’s diagnostic capabilities and enhanced disease surveillance. This category includes Brucellosis, Epsilon Toxin of C. perfringens, food safety threats like Salmonella and Shigella, water safety threats like V. cholera, C. psittscosis, Q fever, ricin toxin, Staph enterotoxin B, typhus fever, and viral encephalitis. The problem is you can’t tell the difference between deliberate poisonings and natural outbreaks.

Category: Microbiology Notes , PSM Notes