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BioWarfare and Cyber Warfare a new Kind Of War: Biowarfare And Info warfare


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4.2Antimicrobial Nanoemulsion


Bayer is not the only company swept up in America’s grim scramble to fend off germ attacks. The $11 million DARPA-funded NanoBio, based in Ann Arbor, Michgan and a spin-off of Michigan University’s Center for Biologic Nanotechnology, has created a nontoxic agent that can destroy most virus, bacterium, and fungus around, from influenza to E. coli to anthrax.15

The agent, a lotion that looks like sunblock, can help prevent people from contracting anthrax but it cannot cure a victim after infection. The microbe-zapping agent is just soybean oil floating in water with nontoxic detergents. It can be rubbed on the skin, used in hot tub, eaten, or put into beverages like orange juice. What makes the stuff potent is how it is made.

The principle is deceivingly simple. When salad dressing is shaken, bubbles of oil are dispersed in the vinegar. These bubbles contain surface tension potential energy. The potential energy is released when the bubbles coalesce. NanoBio’s proprietary technology – antimicrobial nanoemulsion – forms these bubbles, as the name stipulates, at the supertiny nano level. A nanometer is about 100,000 times narrower than a human hair. The nanodroplets, stabilized by detergents they float in, are small enough to literally bombard lipids or fats found in bacteria and viruses, blowing them up in the process. NanoBio’s formula tricks dormant anthrax spore that ambient surface conditions are ideal for germination into an active bacterium. As the spore germinates, it forms a lipid layer, which the nanoemulsions promptly assault. Within a couple of hours, the anthrax is dead.

NanoBio plans to develop a preventive nasal spray in two years.

There are other promising anthrax zappers. A foam developed by New Mexico’s Sandia National Laboratories supposedly neutralizes pathogens and chemicals. It was used to decontaminate traces of anthrax found in the NBC New York offices on October 12, 2001.

5Promises But Not Yet A Sure Cure


Traditional terrorists wanted political concessions but now, some groups have as their main aim mass casualties and mayhem. And their weapon of choice is biological weapons. Terrorists would have little trouble getting their hands on the technology. The apartheid government in South Africa produced terrorist weapons containing anthrax, Salmonella and cholera. Former Soviet scientists who have prepared weapons-grade anthrax and smallpox are known to have emigrated, possibly to well-funded terrorist groups.

With bioweapons so readily available, how can governments protect its citizenry from a terrorist armed with anthrax, smallpox or plague? Until now, most biological defense strategies have been geared to protecting soldiers on the battlefield rather than ordinary people in cities. The situations are quite different now, and novel technologies are needed for civilian defense.16


5.1Hypothetical Bioterrorism


The first simulation has taught officials that biological terrorism poses different problems from a chemical attack, and is potentially much more devastating.

Most doctors have never seen a case of plague or anthrax. So it could be days before they realize what they are dealing with. National governments need to stockpile drugs and vaccines, develop and distribute rapid tests for agents used in bioweapons, and come up with effective ways to isolate infected people.17



Table 4. Estimates of casualties from a hypothetical biological attack. The numbers are based on a 50-kg airborne agent released over a 2-km radius in a city of 500,000 residents. (Table: Adapted from WHO).

Agent

Casualties

Deaths

Anthrax

125,000

95,000

Tularemia

125,000

30,000

Typhus

85,000

19,000

Tick-borne encephalitis

35,000

9,500

Brucellosis

125,000

500

Rift Valley fever

35,000

400

Q fever

125,000

150

5.2Protective Gear


Researchers 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 Monitoring


None 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).

Protocol

Pros

Cons

DNA-based detectors

A prototype machine can identify virulent strains of anthrax in about 30 minutes.

Even the newest device cannot continuously monitor the air. It is another 5 or more years to develop a device of this functionality.

Mass spectrometry

These machines spot anthrax’s molecular profile.

To date no machines adapted for anthrax are available. Development is years away.

Antibody-based tests

Antibodies interact with spores and change color. It is cheap, fast, and is available now.

This device is rather insensitive. It cannot tell a virulent from a harmless strain.

Dog’s nose project

This device is portable. Synthetic compounds instantly glow when they detect distinctive particles in the air.

This device has been used to detect traces of TNT. It may take another 5 years to adapt it for anthrax.

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.


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