The invisible nightmare

Mass murder via poison has a long history. As the authors note, "Germs and warfare are old allies. More than two millennia ago, Scythian archers dipped arrowheads in manure and rotting corpses to increase the deadliness of their weapons. Tatars in the fourteenth century hurled dead bodies foul with plague over the walls of enemy cities. British soldiers during the French and Indian War gave unfriendly tribes blankets sown with smallpox. The Germans in World War I spread glanders, a disease of horses, among the mounts of rival cavalries. The Japanese in World War II dropped fleas infected with plague on Chinese cities, killing hundreds and perhaps thousands of people."

The new generation of biological weapons are far more deadly. In addition to botulinum, Marburg, salmonella, Ebola, smallpox, anthrax and others, the authors describe science-fictiony horrors cooked up by the Soviets, such as recombinant DNA gene splicing that created super-virulent strains of anthrax and smallpox.

Producing sophisticated biological weapons like the latter requires a substantial commitment in funding and legions of highly skilled scientists. But not all germ weapons are so hard to make -- and advances in biological science consistently put more power into wider hands at less and less cost.

One of the most chilling developments, in terms of biological warfare, was the breakup of the Soviet Union. The Soviets invested heavily in the "Biopreparat" -- an overarching institution overseeing germ warfare research that at one time employed more than 30,000 scientists and technicians. The collapse of the USSR left thousands of biologists without unemployment -- but with the skills to conduct germ warfare.

By far the most compelling scene in "Germs" is the description of the decaying Stepnogorsk germ factory in Kazakhstan. Once the premier jewel in the Biopreparat crown, Stepnogorsk boasted a 50-foot-high aerosol test chamber in which the Soviets experimented with their strains of anthrax and Ebola. There were 10 20-ton, four-story-high fermentation vats each capable of brewing 300 tons of anthrax spores in less than a year, and countless underground bunkers "where the finished product" was stored.

But by 1995, "Weeds sprouted from the cracked sidewalks that linked the complex's twenty-five main buildings; there were more potholes than roads. The wire security fences surrounding the compound were torn and no longer electrified. The motion sensors outside the complex were gone. Winter winds that rip across the Central Asian steppe had blown out windows in most of the main buildings. Rain, snow, and ice storms had eroded the gray concrete walls. Air locks that had once kept deadly microbes from escaping now hung open. The plasticized lab floors were torn and buckled from neglect and the weather. Many buildings appeared to be abandoned."

And the scientists who once worked there? They were struggling to survive, while being courted by Iran and Iraq and who knows who else.

The scenario of underemployed Russian biologists selling their smallpox gene-splicing know-how to Baghdad or Tehran or Kabul might, in a more innocent age, seem like a plot for a second-rate James Bond movie. So too, does the Soviet research into psychotropic and neurotropic germ agents that would alter moods and sleep patterns and cause other psychological and physiological changes.

But after Sept. 11, what might once have seemed alarmist suddenly appears to be common sense. A pre-terrorist attack reader could be excused for finding the following reference to bin Laden overly speculative: "Osama bin Laden, the renegade Saudi sponsor of anti-American terrorism, had tried hard to acquire chemical weapons and 'may have' tried to get germ weapons as well."

But post-terror, one reads that line and nods one's head. If not Osama bin Laden, then someone, somewhere, sometime.

That an event of bioterrorist horror will happen seems inevitable. The question then becomes how to defend against it. Aside from physically eradicating all potential terrorists from the world, a prospect that seems unlikely despite Bush administration proposals to the contrary, the main thrust of "Germs" is that the best thing we can do is invest in public health. In the authors' view, harm reduction is the key: We must invest in systems that can quickly detect outbreaks when they occur, contain them effectively, and treat the victims expeditiously.

As the authors observe, over the last 50 years, as the threat of bio-warfare has risen, the state of the public health infrastructure in the United States has declined. A relatively mild outbreak of West Nile virus in New York strained that city's infrastructure to an enormous degree. There are not enough hospital beds to handle the victims of a serious epidemic, there is no overarching authority entrusted with coordinating responses to such outbreaks, and the number of trained personnel in place to respond to such emergencies is pitiful.

Any war on terrorism, the reader can only conclude after digesting "Germs," must include a sustained and expensive campaign to bolster public health. Otherwise the casualties, as Mayor Giuliani noted on Sept. 11, will truly "be more than we can bear."

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