BioWarfare and Cyber Warfare a new Kind Of War: Biowarfare And Info warfare
5.2Protective GearResearchers at Irvin Aerospace in Fort Erie, Ontario, have developed a dome-shaped tent made of ultra tough Mylar that can be filled with a stiff foam - the exact composition of which is a closely guarded proprietary information - that kills germs and also neutralizes chemical weapons. Once covered by the foam-filled tent, a bomb filled with germs can be safely detonated. But what if germs are already in the air? Geomet Technologies near Washington DC and Irvin Aerospace are about to market civilian bio-suits. In the meantime, other companies are designing protective gear that actually kills pathogens. Molecular Geodesics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example, is developing a suit made of a tough, sponge-like polymer that traps bacteria and viruses, which are then destroyed by disinfectants incorporated into the fabric. 5.3Surveillance and MonitoringNone of this gear will do any good, however, if the emergency services do not know there has been an attack. And an stealthy assault may not be obvious. A terrorist might not use a weapon that goes off with a dramatic bang, or even produces an obvious cloud of germs. The first hint of a biological attack may be a sudden cluster of sick people. Even that will be missed unless someone is watching. And few are. In the U.S., financial cutbacks have crippled programs to track disease outbreaks, natural or deliberate. Some could be either, such as food poisoning caused by Escherichia coli O157 or Salmonella. In Europe, disease surveillance is only beginning to be organized on the continent-wide scale needed to track a biological emergency. But in addition to monitoring infected people, Nicholas Staritsyn of the State Research Centre for Applied Microbiology near Moscow says that more effort should be made to find out which bugs live where. For example, a particular variety of anthrax may occur naturally in South Africa, but not in Canada. Having access to such information could help authorities to distinguish between natural outbreaks and deliberate attacks. Even when infected people start turning up at local hospitals, early diagnosis of their illness might not be easy. The first symptoms of anthrax, plague and many other potential agents of bioterrorism resemble those of flu: headaches, fevers, aching muscles, and coughing. What is more, some of these symptoms might be brought on by panic attacks or hysteria, which are likely to be widespread among people who have just been told that they are the victims of a biological attack. One solution would be for hospitals to have the type of high-tech detectors being developed to identify airborne pathogens on the battlefield. With a detector at each bedside, doctors could pick out the volatile molecules released by damaged lung membranes at a very early stage of infection and instantly tell whether a patient was a victim of a biological attack.18 DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, would like to develop reliable (no false positives), lightweight (<2 kilograms), sensitive (can identify as few as two particles of 20 different biological agents in a sample of air), low cost (<$5000) detectors. Such detectors could be deployed around cities to give early warning of airborne disease. In the meantime, researchers led by Wayne Bryden at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore are working on revamping the traditional laboratory workhorse, the mass spectrometer, for use in the field or in hospitals. His group has reduced this unwieldy piece of equipment to a suitcase-sized machine that can distinguish between, say, Shigella, which causes dysentery, and Salmonella. Tiny electronic chips that contain living nerve cells may someday warn of the presence of bacterial toxins, many of which are nerve poisons. Like a canary in a coal mine, the neurons on the chip will chatter until something kills them. While the canary-on-a-chip could detect a broad range of toxins, other devices are designed to identify specific pathogens. One prototype, antibody microarray, consists of a fiber-optic tube lined with antibodies coupled to light-emitting molecules. In the presence of plague or anthrax bacteria, or the toxins botulin or ricin, the molecules light up. Table 3. Pros and cons of various protocols for detecting bioagents. Dog’s nose is solution that turns green on exposure to reagent. (Table: Adapted from Alvin Fox, University of South Carolina, Cepheid, Nomadics, Teracore).
Devices based on antibodies are far from foolproof. First, the correct antibodies have to be identified, not easy when one considers the vast number of pathogens that need to be included, and their ever-changing repertoire of surface proteins. Even the right antibodies can identify only what is on the outside of a particle. Bugs can be encapsulated in gels or biological polymers to foil antibodies, or normally harmless bacteria engineered to carry nasty genes. To overcome this, researchers are developing identification techniques based on RNA analysis. Unlike DNA, which is now used to identify unknown organisms, RNA is plentiful inside cells and need not be amplified before identification begins. And messenger RNA molecules reveal not only what a microorganism is, but what toxins it is making. Once the biological agent has been identified, what measures should be taken to combat it? Vaccinating people before they are exposed is one answer. This is the strategy the military is betting on. In 1997, the U.S. military launched a program to develop vaccines against potential biological weapons. It will create jabs for diseases for which none exist, such as Ebola, and improve existing vaccines, including the 30-year-old MDPH anthrax vaccine being given to 2.4 million American soldiers. 2> |