Panics Over Plagues

The Foreign Policy blog features two articles on the challenge of bioterrorism, the first authored by author Robin Cook, who specializes in fictional tales about this topic. He pictures an accidental combination of superflu bugs that race around the world:

At that point, the story moves quickly as the deadly new agent races around the planet, thumbing its nose at all vain attempts to stop or contain it. Governments and individuals will do desperate things, some rational and others not so, like deploying the military to try to close borders or using firearms to keep possibly infected strangers at bay. Hospitals will be overwhelmed at first and later forced to lock their doors. To avoid interpersonal contact, people will hole up in their homes, causing government offices, schools, and businesses to close. Many public officials will be forced to quarantine themselves from a diseased population and retreat to undisclosed locations, which will only fuel the public panic. Riot police in biohazard suits (if there are even enough to go around) will increasingly be called upon to beat back waves of sick, scared, and helpless civilians, desperate for food, water, and medicine. This won't just be the case in failing states like Somalia and Yemen, but also in successful ones like France and the United States.

But it will all be useless, and the fallout won't be pretty. Normal travel and commerce will slow to a crawl or, in some areas, stop altogether. Some island countries will fare better than continents, but it will be temporary at best. Food distribution will be interrupted, and something akin to famine will ensue in certain parts of the world. Services of all sorts will fall off, including police protection, and marauding gangs and black-marketeers will materialize in a kind of hopeless, Darfurian Wild West. This will bring out the worst in humanity. Neighbor will turn against neighbor, fighting over newly scarce resources or simply out of fear and resentment. Old prejudices will rise to the surface, as minority groups -- be they Jews, black Africans, Shiites, Hispanics, gays, or others -- are blamed for bringing the plague into healthy communities. Long-simmering tensions between old rivals -- Pakistanis and Indians, for example, or Iraqis and Iranians -- will break out into new wars. Fanaticism, especially apocalyptic strains of the major religions, will reign. Plague will be a worldwide infectious holocaust.

And that's why they call him a fiction author - he gets a bit dramatic. Conveniently ignoring all the medical surveillance efforts out there, a significant public health system, and the possibility that people could actually work together and defeat a contagious airborne disease, Cook outlines a future of certain death and destruction - which is good for book sales, not so much for policy.

Emily Anthes, a science journalist, has a more balanced article in FP, but I'm still not buying. She fears that terrorists will use plague as a tool of terror against unsuspecting populaces.

UPDATE: George Smith goes the extra step, as usual, to tear down these articles. He notes (and I should have remembered this) how the US and UK governments had a lot of trouble trying to aerosolize plague (let alone our worrying about terrorists doing it).

She remarks:

Plague warfare is almost as old as the plague itself. In the 14th century, the Tatars catapulted plague-ridden bodies into a town controlled by their Italian enemies. Russians employed a similar tactic when battling the Swedes four centuries later. And during World War II, the Japanese reportedly dropped plague-infected fleas from airplanes while flying over Chinese territory. Modern bioterrorists would probably be even more sophisticated, encapsulating the bacteria in droplets of liquid and spraying them into the air. (In fact, during the Cold War both the United States and the Soviet Union developed techniques to aerosolize plague.) In 1970, the WHO calculated that releasing 50 kg of plague in aerosol form over a city of 5 million could lead to 150,000 plague infections and 36,000 deaths.

And that's without genetic alterations to the pathogen, giving it resistance to antibiotics or making it live longer outside the host so it could spread through the air, which is exactly what some fear is coming next. For obvious reasons, information on whether particular terrorist groups or rogue states are actively working to weaponize plague is sparse to nonexistent. (But in 1995, a white supremacist in Ohio was arrested after illegally obtaining the plague bacteria by mail.) Nevertheless, experts remain convinced that plague is an appealing bioterrorist agent and caution that we should be prepared for its possible use.

Oh come on, Emily. While the US and Soviet Union developed plague as a BW agent, it's not been used since the Japanese military's failed efforts in China. Information on the topic is "sparse" because there is no intel on terrorist development of BW agents - mostly because they AREN'T DOING IT. It's pretty simple. 

Pneumonic plague is nasty, killing up to 50% of exposed patients even if getting treatment. But the trick is getting a sample of bubonic plague, culturing pneumonic plague from a victim, making enough for mass casualty coverage, and disseminating the agent properly. It's not easy. Much easier to get an AK and just do that thing, spray bullets (not bugs) and pray that they hit something.

Comments

[NVH]

Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
--Ghostbusters, 1984, didn't come true by the way

Come on J, cut her some slack, Bio is number one followed by nuke, and just like in Cook's post, all we need is Glenn Beck to come on fox news and say the gov't is doing it wrong and the crazies come out. Personnally, I'm looking forward to putting a couple head wounds in plague victims if it comes down to it, but realistically, I'll probably just stay home from the mall at Christmas time this year. The other thing about all these plots is that hollywood has already covered them in I Am Legend and / or in a Tom Clancy novel, namely Rainbow Six and Teeth of the Tiger. So there's just no way it'll even come close to that, as convincing as Billy Bob Thornton is in Armageddon. I still think we should track where all the best deep core drillers are in the world, just in case. Screw ESSENCE...

[J.]

"Bio is number one followed by nuke." Wow, whose threat assessments are you reading? Hopefully not the Graham-Talent WMD Commission report, which didn't use any threat assessments but rather a "gut check" after talking to a lot of bio-threat analysts looking to guild their nests. Last time I checked with Dr. Ash Carter and Amb Bob Joseph, it was nuke forever first, bio maybe depending on the agent and people's fevered imaginations.

Only wanted to suggest to the readership that they should not put much faith in the future assessments from fiction authors and science journalists, neither group being very logical or factual in their points of view.

[Peter]

Cook sounds well OTT. His account lacks internal logic. If the plague is going to be so virulent, how come "maruading gangs" areable to operate effectively while the police can't?

I think we have to look to historic instances of plague to see what might happen, rather than take Cook's fiction at face value. My guess is that one of the things that would happen is that people would withdraw into themselves, their familities, neighbourhoods, communities - rather than go beserk.

For a literary take on this, Albert Camus's "The Plague" is a good read.

[Scathsealgaire]

If you think that is bad. Read John Ringos "Last Centurion"
Talk about Virulent anti-lib. I may be a con, but damn that book is really OTT.
Never the less, a good read once you get past the OTT anti-lib sentiment. Not necessarily what I would call accurate on the science though.