Diabolical Biological Warfare

A real and agonizing threat has come back to haunt us.

- AL J. Venter

It is a reality of the age we live in  that new (and quite a few old) weapons of war have come back to haunt us. There have been any number of films and TV programs made over the decades in which disease and germs—“biological warfare,” in modern parlance—has been a consistent theme.

These days, we take it all for granted: The denouement invariably ends well, and everybody (or almost everybody) emerges alive and well.

SMALLPOX

However, with smallpox, the reality of this invidious threat is terrifying, because the disease remains a threat. A slew of international agreements have been signed by just about every country on earth acknowledging that biological warfare is illegal, but its presence lingers.

Take one example: Smallpox, which was eradicated worldwide almost two generations ago, remains a real and identifiable threat—so much so that U.S. Special Forces were inoculated against the disease prior to going into Iraq in 2003.

The late Dr. Jonathan Tucker, an international and much respected authority on biowarfare (as well as a good friend of mine and with whom I shared many notes), cited an accident in 1978, a year after smallpox was supposed to have been eradicated worldwide: A smallpox virus escaped from a research laboratory at the University of Birmingham Medical School in Britain.

A medical photographer working on the floor above the laboratory became infected (through air vents, it was thought at the time), and she later died. The disease also spread to her mother, who survived. It was pure luck that a major smallpox outbreak did not result.