ELI GILL Microbiology professor Ralph
Robinson discusses different methods and possibilities of
a bioterrorist attack on the U.S.
DB: There’s lots of talk right now about bioterrorism.
What is it? RR: Nobody has come up with a good definition of
what bioterrorism is. [A biological weapon] would be something
alive ““ a bacteria, virus or a toxin produced by bacteria. In
general, living microbes or toxins produced by microbes to harm
somebody or to do economic harm.
DB: How prolific is the development of biological weapons at
this time? How many countries or groups are looking toward
developing biological weapons? RR: There are probably a dozen
countries that have biological weapons research programs. But it
doesn’t take much to go from research to a production
program.
DB: How would somebody go about producing biological
weapons? RR: First you have to acquire the organism. For
governments and military organizations, that’s not too hard.
Then you have to have the facilities to grow it in large
quantities. Finally, you have to have the ability to deliver it
somehow; this is called weaponization. Weaponization is the most
difficult part because you have to take the biological agent and
store it somehow. It’s a living organism so you have to treat
it well to keep it viable. Then you have to figure out a way to
deliver it to your enemy ““ hopefully without infecting
yourself.
DB: There’s been a nation-wide fear about anthrax in
the past few weeks. How easy would it be to launch a large-scale
anthrax attack on the United States? RR: For anthrax, delivery
is the biggest problem. Anthrax is easy to acquire ““ you can
grow it up really easily and you can store it very easily with no
problem at all. When you store it, it has the consistency of peanut
butter; where as if you dry it, it has the consistency of a soft
brick … If I had 50,000 infectious doses of anthrax right in my
hand, I’d have to deliver that. Imagine getting a little bit
of peanut butter, and having people inhale it. It’s not that
easy to do. If you want to kill a few people, it’d be pretty
easy. If you want to kill a few hundred people, that’s going
to take a lot of work. If you want to kill a few million people
with anthrax, you better have a sophisticated military
operation.
DB: What about the outbreak of anthrax in Florida? RR:
That looks like a small release that is completely unrelated to
other events or it was a test case put on terrorists.
DB: What’s the best action to take with a person or
group of people who contract an airborne virus? RR: It depends
on the agent. If it’s anthrax, there’s no need to
quarantine at all because it’s not contagious from person to
person. It’s critical that people get antibiotic treatment
after one to two days of exposure. We saw that in Florida. You
don’t want to be the first person to have symptoms. The
chances of it being identified and being diagnosed before it comes
down is too late for you. With smallpox, quarantine is essential.
Absolutely essential. If smallpox were to break out in the United
States, all of our travel and all of our movement would come to an
immediate stop. Airplanes would stop; interstate travel would stop.
Nobody would be moving anywhere because there is no treatment and
it’s highly infectious from person to person.
DB: How effective can a smallpox breakout be, and how
readily available is it to somebody who wants to get their hands on
it? RR: The worst bioterrorist event would be the release of
smallpox. It has the potential of killing a billion people
worldwide. There’s very little vaccine and there’s no
treatment. The fatality rate used to be 30 percent. But since it
hasn’t been in the population for several decades,
peoples’ immune systems aren’t up to fighting it and
the fatality rates will be much higher.
DB: But don’t we already have a cure for
smallpox? RR: There is no cure. There is a vaccine, but the
United States currently has 7.5 million doses which could be
splitting the vaccine into 15 million doses. They could dilute it
down and be useful. But that’s the worst-case scenario. A
more moderate case would be economic bioterrorism on a
country’s crops ““ if you want to hit an economic
sector. For example, take foot-and-mouth disease in England. Nobody
is going to get sick from foot-and-mouth disease, but it’s
costing the English billions of dollars. This is the type of event
that a bioterrorist act could create. If you wanted to cause harm
and not harm anybody, that would be a way to do it. It depends on
the goals of the terrorists. Do they want to scare people? Do they
want to kill people? Do they want to cause a lot of damage?
DB: So should we vaccinate the whole community for
smallpox? RR: You can’t be overly cautious with
smallpox. If there were a confirmed outbreak, I think the whole
country would immediately be shutdown, because you don’t know
if there are other outbreaks. If I didn’t care about my own
life and I were a terrorist, I would infect myself with smallpox
and go to the international terminal at the airport. And I would
just infect people through the air. The symptoms for smallpox
don’t show up for 12-14 days. All these people are infecting
other people, and nobody is even sick yet. So until 13 days have
passed, nobody will even know what happened. If this happens, it
would be catastrophic. If there’s only one outbreak [of
smallpox] in a localized area, we could seal it off and localize it
and contain it. But chances are it’s not going to be in one
place. It’s going to show up in several places at once. And
that 15 million doses isn’t going to do anything.
DB: How do you sleep at night knowing this? RR:
Smallpox would be very difficult for a terrorist to get ahold of.
Governments that do have smallpox, the main reluctance that they
have to using it is that sooner or later, it’s going to get
around the world and infect its own people. So that’s a good
deterrent. It has its own built-in safety deterrence. Individual
terrorist groups don’t have access to it. If I thought
terrorist organizations had access to it, I probably wouldn’t
be able to sleep.
DB: So what’s the most likely agent that a
bioterrorist attack will use to attack the United States? RR:
The most likely weapon to be released is anthrax. From a practical
standpoint, it’s the most likely one to be used because
it’s easy to acquire, easy to grow, and the delivery depends
on how many people you want to kill.
DB: What are common symptoms of anthrax? RR: Problem
is, anthrax starts out like the flu. You have a sore throat and
headaches. Then you have problems breathing. If the delivery
mechanism is done properly, the particle size is 1.5 microns and
that’s small enough to get deep into the lungs. If
they’re larger than that they’ll stick in the upper
respiratory track, and it’s not as infectious. You’ll
need a higher dose. If you have a high enough dose, you can get it
in the upper respiratory track and it’ll kill you just as
well.
DB: What do you envision the UCLA Medical Center looking
like in the case of a large scale bioterrorist attack hitting the
Federal Building in Los Angeles? RR: The county facilities
would kick in and they would respond in a very efficient manner. We
are fortunate having the hospital right here and having the Federal
Building right here, because it’s the FBI terrorist response
unit right across the street essentially. On the one hand, the
Federal Building could be a target but on the other hand, we have
federal response right here ““ they don’t have to travel
very far.
DB: Could you specify the difference between biological and
chemical weapons? RR: Biological weapons as a general rule are
alive. The exception is toxins that are produced by biological
agents. From a practical standpoint, a toxin is more like a
chemical weapon, and you can think of a chemical weapon as a
poison. So, they would be released as if you were trying to poison
people. It would not be infectious. You would only be harming the
people you were directly exposing the compound to.
DB: So why don’t we fear chemical weapons just as much
as we do biological weapons? RR: Terrorist organizations would
have a hard time making chemical weapons. Some chemical weapons are
very easy to make and anybody with a little chemistry background
can make those. But you need to have a lot of it before you can
kill a lot of people. Serin is not too difficult to make. But when
you start messing around with things like serin and taban,
you’re at risk of killing yourself during the manufacturing
process. Botulism is the most toxic compound known to humans. Most
experts agree that if somebody tried to purify botulism to a pure
state, they would probably kill themselves in the process.
It’s too dangerous to make the stuff. We should encourage
bioterrorists to try and purify botulism. (laughs)
DB: If a terrorist group were able to pull off a large-scale
bioterrorist attack, how can people protect themselves from
it? RR: As far as personal protection goes, going out and
buying gas masks and stocking up on antibiotics is not an effective
way. If it were a biological or chemical release, you
wouldn’t know to use your gas masks, and you wouldn’t
wear them all the time. A more practical defense would be to be
prepared for a disruption of services. For personal safety, people
are better off buying an earthquake preparedness kit rather than a
gas mask or anything else. You have to put the threat relative to
your personal safety. People here are more likely going to die from
an earthquake or structural damage than they are from a
bioterrorist attack.
Interview conducted by Edward Chiao, Daily Bruin Senior
Staff.