Posted on 10/26/2001 11:19:17 AM PDT by woofie
A bioweapons expert from Sandia National Laboratories says the anthrax-by-mail attacks suggest a degree of sophistication beyond the al-Qaida terrorist organization.
"Unless they bought it from Iraq or something, it's not likely to be al-Qaida," Alan Zelicoff said in an interview Thursday from Washington, D.C. What makes the current attacks different from anthrax outbreaks of the past is not the anthrax itself, but rather the way it has been dispersed, said Zelicoff, who joined Sandia 12 years ago and works for its Center for National Security and Arms Control.
The anthrax in the current attacks has been treated "with materials that make it float in the air. That's no mean trick; it's a hard thing to do," Zelicoff said. "It suggests a sophisticated program with a lot of expertise, not in biology . . . but in aerosol physics."
"That's the big cataclysmic shift," he said.
Ordinarily, anthrax spores would simply fall to the ground, which has kept the bacteria from being a widespread bioterrorism threat in the past.
The current attacks suggest "roomfuls of equipment, specialties in aerosol physics and lots of testing," Zelicoff said.
"It's a hard, hard, hard thing to do and way beyond the capacity" of groups such as the al-Qaida terrorist network or militia organizations, he said.
The United States considers Osama bin Laden, head of al-Qaida, the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
A story in Thursday's editions of The Washington Post quoted government sources as saying the anthrax that contaminated Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's office might have been made in America. The story said the anthrax was treated with a chemical additive made only in the United States, the former Soviet Union and Iraq. It quoted an unnamed source as saying "the totality of the evidence in hand" suggests it was unlikely to have come from the former Soviet Union or Iraq.
However, Zelicoff - who stressed he has no information on the threats beyond what he has read in newspapers - said Iraq has the necessary sophistication, based on information released by a United Nations special commission that did weapons inspections in Iraq through much of the 1990s before Iraq closed its borders to inspections.
"They had the drying equipment; they had the milling equipment; they had the aerosol testing equipment, the expertise on staff in engineering and physics, to do this kind of work," he said.
Scientists at several medical labs around the country have spent days analyzing the bacteria from the attacks, but officials have said it's still unclear whether the mailed anthrax spores, which have caused illness in New York, Washington, Florida and New Jersey, all came from the same place.
There have been 13 cases of anthrax nationwide in the past few weeks, most with known connections to mail.
Zelicoff, whose area of expertise is early detection of large-scale dissemination of biological organisms, was in Washington on Thursday to brief Congress about monitoring for biological threats. The briefing was canceled because of the anthrax investigations.
"The truth about routine monitoring is we do not have it," Zelicoff said. "And that will be key if there's large-scale biological (threats) or someone, God forbid, uses a communicable disease such as smallpox or a new influenza strain."
America's public health system - the repository of information about diseases - is severely underused, he said. It's cumbersome for doctors to report disease information, and it's difficult for public health officials to analyze information when they're not getting enough data from doctors.
For example, one of the postal workers who died came in with flulike symptoms. But, Zelicoff said, there had not been a single case of flu reported in Washington since last winter.
"The doctors don't know that. They don't get routine information, not even to say there's not any flu, so they're not going think twice about dismissing" respiratory complaints, he said.
"It's easy to shrug someone off as having flulike symptoms. . . . But if someone is telling me there's not one single case of flu in Albuquerque, I'd think twice about a bad respiratory illness and not shrug it off as flu," said Zelicoff, a medical doctor.
New Mexico has a pilot program aimed at alerting public health experts to unusual cases or clusters of cases as soon as doctors become aware of them. The program currently operates only at University of New Mexico Hospital and at sites connected with Memorial Medical Center in Las Cruces.
The system "gives data to public health officials in Santa Fe who are the experts. . . . They're good at looking at it and saying, We've seen this before, there's no need to worry,' or That's an unusual pattern, we need to start investigating,"he said.
Such a system made easy for doctors to use and widely operated would allow the nation to spot bioterrorism diseases, since they cause severe symptoms in people who ordinarily are healthy.
"It will capture those cases - not as the result of physicians - but because of patterns of unusual disease," Zelicoff said.
Of course not. But whoever dispersed it, didn't have to make it themselves. It could have been stolen from an American laboratory. Although, if stolen in a large enough quanitity, we probably would know about it. And since they are saying that if would be difficult to reproduce, that brings us back to Iraq or the Russian black market.
"The real one will be a massive distribution with mutated anthrax."
I agree except for the last part of your statement. I think they sent out a variety of trial compounds, variations on the same antrax base. That they did in fact use that scenario has been established, which leaves only the intent up to speculation. I think that having run their trials, they now know which formulation is the most effective, thanks to their selection of high-profile recipients, which guaranteed that they'd get the feedback they sought.
I expect them to hit again, and hard, but with the same compound that they determined to be the most effective. I don't think they'll use anything that's different from what they used in the successful trial, because 1) that would introduce an unknown variable into the formula, and 2) I doubt they've got mutated anthrax, which -- according to the pre-9/11 reports (IMO the only "untainted" information) -- can only come from the US, Russia, or the UK. Since they (again, according to pre-9/11 available information) used a type of anthrax that can only come from Iraq, their relationship to that country would exclude anything but the non-resistant weaponized spored.
Of course if they did have access to American or Russian anthrax, they'd in theory be able to hit us with a resistant strain, however, I think it's a stretch to think that they'd have the ability to obtain those strains, and if they did have them, I think they'd have used them in their trials, because of reason #1 above.
Very ominous, I hope your not right but you probably are. I just hope they don't unleash something like an airborn ebola virus. Something like that could kill 100's of millions including a huge number in the mid-east. I'm sure that wouldn't matter to them though.If that happens we truly are on the edge of apocalypse.
Cheers!
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