An Emerging Form of Warfare

This generation remembers listening to the news in the back of our parents’ cars, hearing about various horrors that we never were able to wrap our heads around--threats of nuclear war, international terrorism, and the like. I remember myself, a highly pretentious seventh grader, listening to these stories and imagining huge missiles being developed across the ocean. But in fact, I never thought about the other weapons that terrorism could include. From learning about international conflict from the radio and history class throughout my life, I was extremely drawn to this topic when I first learned about bioterrorism in an article published in my mother’s college alumni magazine.

A familiar name among AP Bio students, smallpox was once known as the world’s most deadly disease, but after a 12-year eradication effort, the virus was eradicated in 1979, and now only exists in laboratories. While it was active, however, the disease could spread like wildfire, through sneezes, coughs, contaminated bedding and clothing, open wounds, or occasionally skin-to-skin contact. The symptoms manifest after a short period, presenting as a high fever, body aches, and vomiting, before escalating into red spots and a rash with pustules filled with the virus. Many people died from the disease--more 300 million in the 20th century alone.

The Smallpox Virus--Variola

To stop the spread of the disease, extreme measures always had to be taken. Each victim can be expected to pass the virus to everyone else with whom they have been in contact with, so every person exposed has to be vaccinated immediately. After the eradication efforts, routine vaccination for smallpox stopped because the efforts had been so widely successful. Even though this means that most people have lost immunity, there now exist only two labs in the entire world where the smallpox virus is approved to be held--one in the United States, and one in Russia.

However, the location of one of the laboratories has come to be a reason for concern among scientific communities. Until recently, biological weapons were seen as unlikely agents of destruction, mostly because countries previously believed there was a moral line that would be crossed by using them. But it has become known that Russia has continued development of its bioweapons program, even after signing an agreement to put an end to it. It has been speculated that they have been able to create certain weapons infected with smallpox and other viruses, with the intent of causing harm internationally. Some of these weapons are on the scale of ballistic missiles, which can travel between continents. A delivery of smallpox to the United States would be a national emergency as people have not been vaccinated since its eradication, and any form of mutation could have taken place in the virus. As many as 10 other countries are also seeking ways to develop biological weapons.

     But why biological weaponry? Well, these unconventional weapons can be built in mundane situations and operate very discreetly (in aerosol spray form, among others). The workshop can be disinfected and people would only become ill a few weeks after an attack, but the pathogens can kill large amounts of people within a small amount of time and the weapons can cause widespread hysteria even faster than the death toll can rise.

     What this means for us, however, is unclear. Scientists are preparing to deal with possible threats of endemic, learning from the history of outbreaks such as the ancient Egyptian smallpox outbreak, the European plague, and Philadelphia’s yellow fever epidemic in the 1700s, but it is too soon to tell what the future will bring. The world is rapidly changing as new technologies emerge (think CRISPR and other genomic modification tools) and as parts of Earth are being explored for the first time. This makes room for plenty of man-made mutant pathogens created in labs, eradicated pathogens, and newly discovered pathogens from newly explored areas of the world to be brought into civilization for the first time or for the third.

Evidence of a Smallpox Outbreak in Ancient Egypt from a Mummified Human

Unfortunately, there have not been any official efforts in the US to prepare for an attack of bioterrorism. Online searches looking for information on what the US has done in the past years to prepare did not hinder any information, only showing webpages which give information on what individuals should do in the event of this emergency, for example, read here.

It is clear that a new age of warfare is emerging, and it could be even deadlier than the nuclear weapons we have feared for most of our lives.