Naturally contracting a disease is bad enough, but catching a disease and weaponizing it, amplifying it to make it more virulent or relevant or resistant to known vaccines, is beyond up the chart. It turns nature against us. Weapons that wreak havoc by spreading deadly diseases have a long and unfortunate history. Governments have spent billions of dollars developing pathogens that can cause deadly diseases. Even today, some nations stockpile such deadly arsenals.
In a widely publicized news conference, Syria acknowledged as much. The World Health Organization has identified the intentional contamination of our food as one of the greatest biological threats of the 21st century. In today’s globalized economy, where food is transported around the world, there are many opportunities for someone to contaminate food with biological agents. It’s kind of scary when you think about someone potentially introducing a lot of different pathogens into a lot of people or a small number of people. In our not-too-distant past, some people have done this.
The deadliest biological attack in U.S. history was carried out not by foreign terrorists, but by members of a local religious organization. The salad bars at ten local restaurants were intentionally contaminated with salmonella. 751 people were poisoned and 45 were hospitalized as disciples of Guru Rajneeshee tried to incapacitate voters and see their own candidate win the 1984 Wasco County election.
The salmonella incident happened in the United States, but a biological attack can happen anywhere in the world, and so far there has been no coordinated global plan for how to respond to it. The word terrorism conjures images of planes crashing into office buildings or bombs exploding in markets. These are still real threats. The same applies to chemical, mustard gas, defoliant or nerve agent attacks, but there is something far more insidious – biological weapons.
That’s what terrorism is all about, when we talk about biological warfare agents, putting enormous psychological pressure on the audience they want to reach. In many cases, they are invisible, you cannot smell them, and it is for this reason that these types of weapons have a stronger psychological impact on the target audience. Killing five people with a biological agent is more terrifying than killing two hundred people with an explosive device.
