Posted on 02/10/2003 6:17:37 AM PST by RCW2001
Carolyn Lochhead
Monday, February 10, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2003/02/10/ED128362.DTL
THAT LITTLE VIAL of fake anthrax Secretary of State Colin Powell used for his United Nations show-and-tell last week made a point that we have tended to forget.
Regardless of one's views on invading Iraq, it bears remembering the potential havoc from a teaspoon of anthrax, or any deadly agent, sprinkled in a letter or dusted in a croissant factory.
The anthrax-laced letter to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle a year ago last October disrupted Congress and closed key federal office buildings for months, including the offices of California's two senators. Five people, including two postal workers, died. Thousands of other postal workers and Capitol Hill staff were forced to take a long series of potent and unpleasant antibiotics.
More than a year later, the Brentwood postal facility in Washington, D.C., which once sorted 2.5 million pieces of mail daily, remains closed. Cleanup at the Trenton, N.J., mail-sorting center has not even begun. The millions of pieces of mail addressed to the 20200 to 20500 government ZIP-codes are now irradiated. To date, the U.S. Postal Service has spent more than $100 million dealing with the attacks.
The case remains unsolved.
Powell said Iraq has 25,000 liters of anthrax, about 5 million teaspoons. He also said Iraq has weaponized botulinum toxin, aflatoxin and ricin, which perhaps coincidentally was found last month in a London apartment used by suspected Algerian terrorists.
Ricin has historically been favored by assassins (the Bulgarian secret police killed a dissident in London in 1978 by shooting a ricin pellet from the tip of an umbrella). It causes rapid, severe internal bleeding.
Powell said Iraq has researched biological agents to produce gas gangrene, plague, typhus, tetanus, cholera, camel pox and hemorrhagic fever. But states are not the only ones capable of making such agents. Iraq got its initial anthrax culture via a U.S. mail-order company; some experts contend that a biological weapons arsenal could be produced in a 15-by-15-foot room for $10, 000.
Nor is it necessary to send bombers loaded with such agents over U.S. cities. Panic and economic paralysis can be achieved much more easily: A plague outbreak would not be helpful to the stock market.
Nor are vials of deadly agents likely to be picked up by metal detectors. Not that salad bars and cattle ranches have metal detectors. Experts repeatedly warn that the complex U.S. food system is particularly vulnerable.
Last summer, an exercise called "Silent Prairie" conducted by veterinarians,
military planners and other experts posited that a deadly attack on U.S. farms could begin with a single virus-laden cotton swab.
A similar project sponsored by Harvard University showed that an infection of foot-and-mouth disease -- which ravaged Britain's food and tourism industries in 2001 -- could spread to 44 states within two weeks after its introduction at a handful of U.S. farms, forcing the destruction of 48 million head of livestock, and quarantining entire states.
The cost of even a tiny outbreak of the disease on just 10 U.S. farms has been estimated at $2 billion. Experts call the threat "econo-terrorism."
A World Health Organization report last month noted that an accidental 1991 outbreak of hepatitis A infected 300,000 people who ate clams in China, and 224,000 people were infected in a 1994 U.S. salmonella outbreak that started with a contaminated ice cream mix.
"If an unintentional outbreak . . . can affect 300,000 individuals," the WHO report said, "a concerted, deliberate attack could be devastating, especially if a more dangerous chemical, biological or radio-nuclear agent was used."
E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead@sfchronicle.com
Do they realise this makes the perfect case to go oust the madman?
I know it is not nearly as serious, but back when West Nile viurs appeared on the East Coast my first thought was "viral warfare."
If any of your peace-nik friends say that we should not fight the war in Iraq while the US economy is still recovering, point out to them that by using the state of the US economy as a determining factor in strategic planning, makes the state of the US economy the most vulnerable element of our military machine.
Bellyaching about the effect of war on the stock market only makes it advantageous for your enemy to attack the stock market, which is, ultimately, not defensible.
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