Biohazard

Clinton announced new government spending of $1.4 billion in fiscal year 2000 to create and strengthen urban emergency response teams, protect government buildings, improve the nation's ability to detect and diagnose disease outbreaks linked to biological agents, and increase national stockpiles of vaccines and antibiotics. Close to $400 million would be spent on detection technology and research into new vaccines.

Donna Shalala, the secretary of health, spoke after Clinton. "This is the first time in American history in which the public health system has been integrated directly into the national security system," she said. The President warned Americans not to panic. He insisted that new intelligence needs would not infringe on civil liberties.

America has done more than any other nation to protect civilians from biological weapons. But it is not clear, for all of its efforts, that its citizens are any safer.

No one can seem to agree on the best approach to biodefense. The First Responders Program has already encountered criticism. "This approach merely displaces risk, and forces the terrorist, who is often flexible, to select a 'softer' target, in this case a city which did not receive the needed training and equipment," Frank Cilluffo, director of the Terrorism Task Force at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in testimony before Congress on October 2, 1998. The real problem is that it assumes an identifiable scene of attack; biological weapons will most likely be deployed in secret and leave no trace.

Early biodefense exercises revealed serious flaws and a general confusion as to how to coordinate local and federal efforts. In a simulated attack staged in New York City in 1998, nearly all of the members of an emergency unit dispatched to the scene "died" because they were insufficiently protected. "They did all the right things," a federal official who watched the exercise told The New York Times. "But the scenario utterly defeated them." The emergency teams were hampered by their inability to identify which biological agents had been used.

Early detection is a key element of biological defense. Depending on the agent and the manner of its dissemination, physicians and emergency rescue teams may have as little as an hour to figure out how to contain a looming medical catastrophe.

The United States has been investigating detection systems with varying degrees of success since World War II. Most methods involve the exposure of vials or petri dishes containing laboratory-grown cultures to air samples from a suspected target area. This can be a laborious process. A field monitoring device used during the Gulf War took between thirteen and twenty-four hours to make a positive identification. For botulinum toxin, one of the staples of Iraq's arsenal, this would already be too late. Technology has improved since then. The Biological Integrated Detection System (BIDS) cut the time to only thirty minutes, but it can so far only determine the presence of anthrax, plague, botulinum toxin, and staphylococcus enterotoxin B.

In September 1998, Clinton and Yeltsin agreed in Moscow on a program of "accelerated negotiations" to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention. The United States has taken the lead in efforts to bring the treaty up to date. A so-called ad hoc group of countries met four times in 1998 to draft an amendment for mandatory inspections in countries suspected of developing or harboring biological weapons. Other measures discussed include requiring countries to open their biological facilities to regular visits from international inspectors and setting up a unit to investigate suspicious outbreaks of disease. Five more meetings of the ad hoc group are scheduled for 1999. Areas of discussion will broaden to include methods of blocking the transfer of sensitive technology on the Internet, at scientific conferences, and through student ex change programs.

The amendments, if approved, would provide a useful curb against future proliferation. But a determined state is likely to find ways to circumvent them. Consider Iraq, where the United Nations Special Commission has been given virtually unlimited authority to monitor every aspect of the disarmament program imposed by the U.N. Security Council since the Gulf War. These measures are far tougher than any contemplated under the ad hoc process and constitute an intrusion into national sovereignty that would not be tolerated by most countries. Yet despite the periodic threat (and implementation) of military strikes, Iraq has defied U.N. inspections at will. How likely are we then to impose a similar degree of compliance on larger and less isolated world powers, such as China, India, or Russia?