AFF/BIOLOGICAL

SMALLPOX IS A DEADLY BIOLOGICAL WEAPON

GERM WEAPONS ARE EASY TO MAKE AND SPREAD — SMALLPOX EXAMPLE

WILLIAM J. BROAD March 4, 2001 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel SECTION: CROSSROADS; Pg. 02J HEADLINE: Smaller cheaper, stealthier, deadlier //VT2002acsln

Consider smallpox. It is deadly and highly contagious, and devices dispensing the virus can be relativley crude. To help judge the nation's vulnerability to clandestine smallpox attacks, Army experts fitted men's briefcases with tiny aerosol generators and, in May 1965, sprayed mock smallpox germs in National Airport in Washington. The report on the secret test showed that 1 in every 12 travelers would have become infected, quickly spreading the disease across the country.

Military planners say germ weapons can be cheaper, stealthier and potentially more devastating than nuclear warheads. And though germs and biological toxins are hard for attackers to use with hurting themselves, at least 17 nations, including some considered sponsors of terrorism, are suspected of having or trying to acquire such outlawed weapons.

SMALLPOX VIRUS KILLS 33% OF THOSE EXPOSED

Smallpox: This virus attacks people with symptoms like high fever, skin blisters, bleeding mucous membranes. There is no known treatment and death comes in almost 33 per cent of cases.

SMALL POX KILLED 500 MILLION PEOPLE DURING THIS CENTURY

MICHAEL OSTERHOLM, School of Public Health, Univ. of Minnesota, 2000; LIVING TERRORS: What America needs to know to survive the coming bioterrorist catastrophe //VT2002acs p. 17-18

To put smallpox Into perspective, one only need look at what disease and death it caused throughout the world in the twentieth century. The world's population was much smaller, of course, through most of this century - 1.6 billion people in 1900, compared to 6 billion in 1999-and smallpox was substantially reduced in most of the developed world by the 1940s. Still, despite its relative rarity through much of the century in so many areas of the world, approximately 500 million people died of smallpox in the century that just ended. This compares with 320 million deaths during the same period as a result of all military and civilian casualties of war, cases of swine flu during the ruinous 1918 pandemic, and all cases of AIDS worldwide. These staggering numbers make painfully clear how grave a global crisis any return of smallpox would represent; the use of it as a weapon would constitute the ultimate crime against humanity.

SMALLPOX AND ANTHRAX HAVE THE GREATEST POTENTIAL AS BIOWEAPONS

MICHAEL OSTERHOLM, School of Public Health, Univ. of Minnesota, 2000; LIVING TERRORS: What America needs to know to survive the coming bioterrorist catastrophe //VT2002acs p. 13

In 1998 1 was part of a working group organized by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies, which considered potential agents that present the greatest risk for transmission, ability to infect large numbers of civilians, and, of course, cause death. We concluded that smallpox and anthrax had the greatest potential for mass casualties and civil disruption. Others of serious concern were plague, botulism, tularemia, and viral hemorrhagic fever.