Bioweapons could catch U.S. cities off guard

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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — If America’s less-than-rapid
response to the H1N1 pandemic is an indicator of how the U.S. public health
system would react in the event of a bioweapon attack, we are in deep, deep
yogurt, folks.

It’s taken more than six months to ramp up production of a
vaccine for a contagious disease that health officials worldwide knew was
coming.

Fort Worth parents remember all too well the late April
decision by school district officials to close all 144 local campuses for more
than a week because of concerns about the spread of swine flu.

Wouldn’t it have made sense to vaccinate children against
H1N1 before school started this fall?

“Sure it would have,” said retired Air Force Col.
Randall Larsen, executive director of the Commission on the Prevention of
Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation and Terrorism and author of
“Our Own Worst Enemy.” “But there’s a problem. There’s (just)
one facility in the United States making H1N1 vaccine, and it’s using the same
technology we used 50 years ago.”

Inoculating eggs — produced at the 35 U.S. chicken farms
operated with the sole purpose of vaccine production — with a virus that then
creates hundreds of thousands of copies of itself is Cold War technology.

The efficiency of the virus replication determines how much
and how fast vaccine can be produced.

In the case of the H1N1 vaccine, reproduction was
“sluggish,” admitted Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen
Sebelius in an Oct. 28 news conference.

The nation’s lack of progress in moving to cell-based
vaccine technology — which would cut production time from about 23 weeks to
between 12 and 14 weeks and produce more vaccine — should be a concern to every
American who has given so much as a nanosecond of thought about the country’s
ability to recover from a bioweapons attack. Because preventing such an
incident is nigh on impossible.

“It is hard to have a preventive policy for
bioterrorism because of the vast variety of agents available,” said
retired Maj. Gen. John Parker, the former commanding general of the U.S. Army
Medical Research and Material Command at Fort Detrick, to journalists
participating in a seminar last week on the WMD threat and America’s
communities sponsored by the Heritage and El Pomar foundations.

A December 2008 report issued by the Commission on the
Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation and Terrorism
concluded that terrorists will be more likely to use a biological weapon than a
nuclear one in a future attack on the United States.

As disquieting as it is to hear, the materials to construct
a bioweapon aren’t difficult to obtain, even in a post-9-11 world.

The level of technological expertise needed to manufacture a
bioweapon isn’t high, said the “World at Risk” report.

And the materials needed to make such a weapon aren’t all
closely monitored. Many of the pathogens are readily available — in nature, in
sick people and in laboratories.

The key to mitigating the long-term terrorism value of a
bioweapon is rapid response, recognition and recovery — and recovery includes
having therapeutics available ASAP for those exposed and vaccines to prevent
the spread.

“The point of terrorism is not just to claim victims
but to terrorize everyone around them,” said Cliff May, president of the
Foundation for Defense of Democracies and an adviser to the Baker-Hamilton
Commission of the U.S. Institute of Peace.

The impact of a dirty bomb or a biological weapon going off
somewhere in the United States wouldn’t be confined to the number of people
killed or exposed to the pathogen or radiological agent, he said.

“The psychological and economic effects would be far
greater than the initial public health threat,” May said.

As Larsen concludes in his book, terrorists will again
attack the United States. The appropriate reaction, he wrote, “should be
shock, but not surprise.

“Americans will always be shocked when ruthless,
immoral cowards intentionally kill innocents, but we can no longer justify
being surprised.”

Via McClatchy-Tribune News Service.