BIOTERRORISM
Red scare for a new millennium
By Hillel W.
Cohen
Soldiers and cops gown up in decontamination suits. With
guns, flashlights and electronic sensors they move carefully
through smoke-filled streets, stepping over bodies on the
ground. Ambulances and helicopters drown out the crackling of
walkie-talkies.
It is not a movie. It is a bioterrorism drill in the
United States. According to a program currently underway,
this scene will be played out in at least 120 cities. In
Wisconsin last year, one cop taking part accidentally set off
his pepper-spray canister. With irritated eyes and lungs,
some of the participants panicked, thinking that the scenario
they were following had become real.
These Pentagon-led drills are just one part of a
multi-billion-dollar program known as "bioterrorism
initiatives." Research labs are studying exotic toxins and
diseases that "might" be used in an attack. City and county
health departments have set up bioterrorism units to handle
emergencies that no one really expects to happen. A lot of
resources that might otherwise have been used for public
health are being diverted to "protect" the public from
bioterrorism.
What is bioterrorism? This new word has come to mean the
use of biological or chemical--sometimes even
nuclear--weapons in a terrorist attack. Since 1997,
bioterrorism has become a major topic in public health
institutions on the federal, state and local level.
It beats out food and blood safety
The Surgeon General's office puts bioterrorism third on a
list of four areas of global concern--after polio eradication
and emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, which
include HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. Bioterrorism is
ranked ahead of food and blood safety.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based in
Atlanta, have launched a national health alert network in
order to coordinate responses to bioterrorist attacks. The
Association of Schools of Public Health is trying to make
bioterrorism a core item in the education programs for all
public health students. Medical journals have regular
articles about the need to train doctors to recognize the
symptoms of anthrax and smallpox in the emergency rooms of
local hospitals.
With all this attention and money, you might think that
bioterrorism has taken a huge toll in lives in the United
States and other countries.
Think again.
In the United States, the number of people who have died
due to bioterrorism attacks in the last 100 years is
exactly--zero. And in the whole world, there have been only
three documented incidents.
The most widely known was in Tokyo in 1995. Members of a
religious cult released a chemical agent in a subway, killing
12 people. The same group had killed seven in an incident
several months earlier in a Tokyo suburb.
The only other case took place in Oregon in 1984, when a
religious cult purposely contaminated several salad bars with
salmonella bacteria. Over 700 people were sickened, but none
died or were even sick enough to be hospitalized.
Yet in news reports, press releases and conferences on
bioterrorism, these incidents are mentioned over and over
again to convince the public that bioterrorism is a real
threat.
Real hazards downplayed
In 1984, the same year as the salmonella attack, an
industrial accident in Bhopal, India, in a factory owned by
the U.S. corporation Union Carbide, killed thousands of
people--so many that an accurate count was never
accomplished. Many more were blinded or otherwise permanently
disabled.
Every year in the United States, according to testimony at
congressional hearings, there are approximately 60,000
chemical spills, leaks and explosions, of which about 8,000
are considered "serious." Together, they are responsible for
some 300 to 400 deaths. In addition, an estimated 76 million
illnesses from food-borne disease occur each year, leading to
325,000 hospitalizations and about 5,000 deaths.
Compared to these staggering numbers, the alleged threat
from bioterrorism is just about zero. There's a much, much
greater risk of being hit by lightning than being a victim of
bioterrorism.
In fact, the dangers from the "anti-terrorism" campaign
are much greater than the virtually non-existent danger from
bioterrorism.
So why do the Clinton administration and so many federal,
state and local health agencies put bioterrorism at the top
of their agendas?
Diverting public
health dollars
A major reason is that terrorism in general and
bioterrorism in particular are useful for justifying bigger
budgets for the Pentagon and Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Bioterrorism is also a handy excuse for all sorts of nasty
business lumped in the budget under "defense."
For example, the U.S. government claimed that a medicine
factory in the Sudan was making bioterrorism materials. The
Pentagon destroyed the factory on Aug. 20, 1998, with two
cruise missiles. Within days, the allegations were shown to
be false. It is apparent now that the Pentagon and CIA never
had any real evidence for their claim. Yet a factory that
supplied half the medicines for North Africa and parts of the
Middle East was wiped out. How many people have died or
suffered needlessly for lack of these medicines?
The U.S. government also continues to claim that the
government of Iraq makes or stockpiles biological and
chemical weapons, thus justifying economic sanctions that
have already led to the deaths of over a million Iraqi
people. But it is the United States that has the largest
stockpile of chemical weapons in the world, even though
Washington pledged to destroy these stocks.
The Pentagon spends more each year than the next 10
biggest military powers combined. The U.S. stockpiles more
"weapons of mass destruction," including nuclear weapons,
than the rest of the world added together.
For decades the anti-communist red scare was used to
justify the enormous waste of military spending. With the
fall of the Soviet Union, it is hard for the capitalists and
their politicians to explain why hundreds of billions more
are needed every year. Bioterrorism could become the phantom
menace of the new millennium.
Next: How the campaign against bioterrorism may be
dangerous to your health.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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