Bioterrorist Attack: Fact or Fiction?

The recent Ricin incident in Las Vegas in February of this year has once again brought new attention to the potential for a biological terrorism attack on US soil. However, given the fact that no actual incident of any magnitude has occurred nor has any plot been uncovered to produce a major event so far it leads one to wonder what is the real potential for a biological weapons attack. Movies like Outbreak have lead Americans to believe that some terrorist group can wipe out a whole city with a biological agent and send in the men in white space suits to rescue the few survivors. While the potential devastation (in human lives) from an attack with a biological agent like Ebola virus or anthrax bacillus is much greater again there is no evidence of any effort to undertake such an attack in this or any other country.

Those who would disagree with the above will undoubtedly call to mind the ricin mail letters that were sent or Washington and New York locations in the winter of 2004. While these letters made front page headlines for weeks the actual number of people that were adversely affected was small. Likewise, in the 2001 Anthrax letter mailing episode the total number of people effected was small. A list of actual ricin related attacks or events is provided in the Special Ricin Study performed by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (cited at end of article). This list shows that no large number of deaths or injuries resulted from any of these events. A suicide bomber with a vest full of explosives would have rained much more havoc in each of these cases.

The Point - The point to all this is that by the end of the 2008 fiscal year the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will have spent $50 billion on defense against bioterrorism attacks. Let's assume for the moment that the biological weapons threat is more fantasy then fact, how much law enforcement and emergency response equipment would State and local police department have bought with that amount of your tax payer dollars? Need updated cruisers, computers, commutations systems and centers, or weapons and ammo for use on your beat? Fifty billion will buy a bunch of that stuff.

With that amount of money we could probably have built that infamous "2000 mile Fence" across the US- Mexico border and saved the lives of tens of dozens of dedicated DEA and Border Patrol Agents who have been gunned down, slaughtered or run down by Hummers in the past few years. Of yeah, it might also have stemmed the flow of illegal drugs into out country and, of course, kept out who knows how many millions of illegal immigrants many of them bringing criminal activity to your neighborhoods.

What Did We Get for $50 Billion? - So what exactly have we gotten for all that money?
For one thing we have a series of National Centers for study of bioterrorism organisms established at major universities around the country. That sounds good on the surface until you realize that most of these were university research departments that were hurting for grant money and all of a sudden saw a way to keep their research going under the guise of "Bioterrorism prevention". Did I mention that all these groups have extensive ties to government agencies that provided these funds? This is not to mention that in a 2007 report by the Office of Public Health Preparedness it stated. "American laboratories handling the world's deadliest germs and toxins have experience more that 100 accidents and missing shipment (of germs) since 2003. They describe accidents involving anthrax... and plague-causing bacteria in 44 labs in 24 states". DHS and CDC have subsequently recommended that these labs tighten up on their security procedures.