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.
I KNEW it!
See reply 26 by Don Joe.
Don, if you are not going to use mutated anthrax, your field try will have to follow quickly on your trials before the boffins at Fort Detrick and Atlanta can come up with an effective defence and the government can put it in place.
OTOH if you already have a tested mutated anthrax and just need to test distribution modalities, hold your mutated strain in reserve and don't let the Fort Detrick boffins get an advanced look at it.
Testing a disease is not as tough as testing distribution, especially if you have no compunctions against risking lives.
I'll tell Dr Zelicoff you said so....in the meantime may I refer you to post #55
Read up on anthrax antitoxins on this thread: Doctor of cured anthrax patient: 'It was horrendous'.
Good question. Apparently, the government is currently in a first class swivet about what it should tell the American public (and the world) and what it should keep secret. But more ominous, is the story that quietly leaked on the Imus radio program on the morning of 25 October 2001. To wit:
In an on-air conversation with Don Imus, NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell spoke on the negative psychological and political impacts on U.S. citizens of learning that U.S. government covert operatives would, by necessity, need to participate in terrorist activities - meaning blowing things up and killing people on U.S. soil - in order to "obtain their bonafides" with terrorist organizations. That's not the kind of stuff some network reporter thinks up on her own. Obviously somebody who thinks about this stuff for a living had given her the tidbit of administration thinking on deep deep background. Shades of OKC.
God help us
It is beyond the capacity of Militia organizations
Not "something". Not "bought". A gift.
Of course, anything is possible, now that the Islamists have crossed the biowar Rubicon. Nevertheless, what we have actual evidence of is anthrax. Despite all the nonsense that has been put out on this subject over the last few weeks, anthrax is a near-perfect weapon of mass destruction, in many ways superior to nukes. People need to start thinking about how 9/11 and the threat to release anthrax fit into a logical military plan, given the known ambitions of OBL and Saddam Hussein. Ask yourself, "What is Saddam's secret plan to win?" Everything makes sense when you start to think in those terms. The use of smallpox, or any highly infectious disease, makes a lot less sense in that context, IMO.
My guess is that the master plan goes like this:
The plan is audacious. So was 9/11. More or less, we are looking at a replay of the 1940s here, only in the Middle East. I suspect the end result will be the same, and that Islam will end up in the dustbin of history, but we may see death and destruction on a tremendous scale before that day arrives.
Apparently my comment was not clear enough for some. I was praising the freeper who, with humor, busted the nonsense that just because Bin Ladin might not have the technology to do this, he doesn't have the resouces to buy it.
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