[iwar] [fc:Today's.Germ.War,.Yesterday's.Weapons]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-29 21:51:47
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:US.readies.for.next.big.threats]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Taliban.Claims.Mounting.Evidence.of.US.Using.Chemical.Weapons]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
Message-Id: <200110300551.f9U5plb03804@red.all.net>
To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List)
Organization: I'm not allowed to say
From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com
Precedence: bulk
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 21:51:47 -0800 (PST)
Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Today's.Germ.War,.Yesterday's.Weapons]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS
Today's Germ War, Yesterday's Weapons

 Research suggests that smallpox could be easily genetically altered--in
which case vaccinations might not protect us.


By WENDY ORENT, Wendy Orent writes frequently on biological weapons and
emerging infectious diseases

ATLANTA -- "It's not your mother's smallpox," says Dr. Robert Kadlec,
physician and National Defense University professor. "It's an F-17 Stealth
fighter--it's designed to be undetectable and to kill. We are flubbing our
efforts at biodefense. We don't think of this as a weapon--we look naively
at this as a disease."

Kadlec is talking about a form of smallpox that doesn't exist yet--so far as
we know. But recent research in Australia on genetically engineered mousepox
virus shows that such a Stealth-fighter agent may be simpler to create than
Western experts used to think. Genetically modified smallpox adds additional
terror to a weapon that's already deadly--a weapon we now understand could
actually be used against us.

As we have learned in recent weeks, terrorists have already used biological
weapons on our soil: highly refined anthrax delivered in a simple but lethal
way. Smallpox would be no harder to distribute: Like anthrax spores,
smallpox is durable in the external environment and could easily be dried,
turned into powder and enclosed in a letter. But as a weapon it's far more
frightening: Smallpox, unlike anthrax, is wildly contagious as well as
lethal. The bioterrorist threat has made the U.S. government ratchet up
plans to produce 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine by next year to meet
the threat of a smallpox biological weapon. But in stockpiling vaccines we
are planning a campaign based on a very old war. Many in the U.S. biodefense
community do not want to combat a possible new threat--vaccine-resistant
smallpox--with old weapons: in this case, a smallpox vaccine that might well
not work against the smallpox strain released. But government research into
the best way to combat an altered smallpox is controversial.

The threat of engineered poxvirus is real. Interviews with former Soviet
scientists suggest that Soviet bioweapons labs were actually close to
creating it more than 10 years ago. But at this point, scientists and
biodefense experts worried about resistant smallpox face a paralyzing
dilemma over how to create and test such an agent. Even discussion hangs
suspended.

Unlike Soviet bioweaponeers, who were trying to build more lethal agents,
the Australian scientists stumbled on their results. Working on a high-tech
method of mouse fertility control, they inserted a gene that produced a
mammalian hormone, interleukin-4 (IL-4), into mousepox, a disease of mice
that's related to smallpox. The engineered mousepox killed most of the mice
injected with it, including those mice that, through vaccination or
heredity, were supposed to be immune.

"Monster mousepox," as pox virologist Mark L. Buller of Saint Louis
University calls it, kills not by changing the virus itself, but rather by
subverting the mouse's immune system. This experiment raises the specter of
diabolical new biological weapons. Humanity evolved alongside certain
diseases, smallpox among them, in an arms race between germs and our
species. Over millennia, human populations developed resistance to
particular diseases. But what if those evolved defenses--and vaccine-induced
immunity, as well--could be shut down by a gene incorporated into the
pathogen itself?

Sergei Popov is a Russian scientist who worked, until he defected in 1992,
at Vector Laboratories, a Soviet facility in Siberia that conducted
clandestine research into smallpox. He says that Vector and other Soviet
labs worked with such immunosuppressive agents, synthesizing both immune
peptides and the genes that produced them. They studied the effects of these
peptides on animal and perhaps on human immunity; they put the synthesized
genes into living viruses. They were on their way to "monster mousepox" and
beyond--and this work began over 20 years ago.

Many American scientists once doubted that genetically engineered diseases
could become functional biological agents. But since "monster mousepox,"
even the skeptics are beginning to think again. "We believed that, given the
multicomponent nature of the immune responses to viruses, it would be very
difficult to engineer them to evade vaccine-induced immunity without
compromising the virus's pathogenicity," says Peter B. Jahrling of the
United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
(USAMRIID). "It was a simple idea, and it was wrong. You can engineer the
body's response to the virus instead!"

Popov worked in an ultra-secret division of the Soviet bioweapons program
known as "Factor," which "dealt with small peptides and immune modulators.
We started [by] making small genes to produce these peptides. The customer
[the Soviet Ministry of Defense] wanted strains with new peptides" for
weapons development, says Popov.

By 1981, Soviet scientists knew that viruses could be engineered to express
human immune peptides. In 1984 and 1985, Vector researchers incorporated
such toxins directly into mousepox and vaccinia, the smallpox vaccine virus,
which is closely related to smallpox and often substituted for it in
experiments.

Did the Soviets actually synthesize IL-4 to make vaccine-resistant smallpox
as the Australians did inadvertently with mousepox? There is no evidence
that they did, though all necessary steps were in place in their labs by
1992. And the opportunities to make this strain today may be greater than we
like to think. Most biodefense experts believe that smallpox has
proliferated beyond the two laboratories, one in the U.S. and one in Russia,
authorized by the World Health Organization to maintain stocks of the
disease. North Korea has it, and other rogue states may as well.
Vaccine-resistant smallpox is now a credible threat--especially since the
publication of the Australian experiment.

But U.S. experts are in a quandary over what to do about it. In a series of
recent New York Times articles, reporters Judith Miller, William Broad and
Stephen Engelberg revealed that the Pentagon has secretly considered
creating an engineered strain of anthrax that incorporates two genes from a
related bacterial species. The Defense Department is interested in testing a
claim made by Russian researchers that this strain overcomes the immunity
conferred by anthrax vaccine. But even discussing such testing has caused an
uproar. Some experts feel the Pentagon has come close to violating the 1972
Biological Weapons Convention by just talking about it. Repeating the
mousepox experiment would undoubtedly cause an even greater furor, and
altering smallpox would be unthinkable.

But, especially now, in the face of ruthless terrorism, we need to know
whether a weapon developed against natural smallpox can still protect us
against engineered strains. The solution is not to do this experiment alone.
Recent smallpox research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
in Atlanta has been conducted under the auspices of the World Health
Organization. Any testing of engineered strains must be conducted the same
way--openly, transparently and with the full cooperation of the people who
know the agent well, including the former Soviet scientists at Vector.
"Secrecy is fatal," warns John D. Steinbruner, bioterrorism expert at the
University of Maryland. Doing this work openly and cooperatively is the only
way to avoid the appearance that the U.S. has gone back into the
biological-weapons business itself.

There are influential voices within the government that want to keep IL-4
research classified: They don't want to make the work of bioterrorists any
easier. But the genie has left the lamp. Two decades of Russian research and
the widely publicized Australian experiment make secrecy impossible. If the
smallpox vaccine can no longer protect the world, we need to know it, so
that alternate therapies, including new vaccines and better antiviral drugs,
can be developed while there is time.

------------------
http://all.net/ 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:US.readies.for.next.big.threats]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Taliban.Claims.Mounting.Evidence.of.US.Using.Chemical.Weapons]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2001-12-31 20:59:58 PST