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2005

There were no documented uses of biological weapons this year. However, in January a man in Florida was arrested after having been found to have ricin in his possession. In March and November there were false positive alarms for anthrax being detected in Department of Defense mail facilities; while in October there was a false positive alarm for tularemia being detected on the Mall in Washington D.C.

Natural outbreaks this year involving Category I agents included:

• Outbreaks of Anthrax which occurred in China, Guinea Bissau, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Turkey, and Zimbabwe (twice).
• Outbreak of Yersinia pestis in Congo.
• Outbreak of Ebola in Congo.
• Outbreak of Marburg in Angola.
• Outbreaks of Tularemia in Russia and the United States.

Progress was made this year in developing the following countermeasures:

• Drugs - development of new drugs continued for the treatment of anthrax, botulinum toxin, and smallpox.
• Vaccines - development continued on new vaccines against anthrax, clostridium botulinum, francisella tularemia, ricin, smallpox, viral hemorrhagic fevers and yersinia pestis.
• Diagnostics - development continued on new diagnostic tests for smallpox.

Several recurring themes were identified throughout this year’s biodefense news stories:

• Although overall there has been some increase in funding, the US public health system remains underfunded, in spite of clear evidence of the dangers of this. This underfunding leads to a lack of readiness in state public health departments.
• The controversy over the safety of the US military’s current anthrax vaccine and whether it should be administered to US military personnel.
• The looming threat of the emergence of new infectious diseases, as evidenced by the avian influenza outbreak.
• Apathy of the pharmaceutical industry towards the Project BioShield legislation, leading to the drafting of a new round of legislation to encourage their participation in the development of biodefense countermeasures.
• The operational refinement and integration of the automated disease surveillance programs.
• The increasing use of simulations - aka biodefense wargames - such as Atlantic Storm - in learning how to improve planning for a response to a biological warfare attack at the international, national, regional, and local levels.
• Preventing research which can lead to the development of new genetically engineered virulent infectious diseases is impossible.
• The controversy over whether biodefense research should be conducted in secrecy or in the open, and how to balance the openness of scientific research with the potential dangerous uses it can be put to, as articulated by the controversy over publishing the article on how to contaminate the US milk supply with clostridium botulinum toxin in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.
• The increasing opposition voiced by individuals who are going to have biodefense laboratories built in their neighborhoods, best evidenced by the residents of Boston’s South End and residents near Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.
• The growing opposition to the amount of resources being invested in biodefense research, to the detriment of research in cancer, etc.

Finally???
The mysterious story of the year was the inability of the US to identify the individual(s) responsible for the ricin attacks of 2004 as well as the individual(s) responsible for the anthrax attacks of September 2001, coupled to the legal jousting between the US government and “person of interest” Steven Hatfill.

The most surprising story of the year was how poorly trained individuals in the US medical and public health systems were found to be in terms of their ability to detect and respond to a bioterrorist attack.

The most sobering story of the year was the end of the unsuccessful hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The most chilling story of the year were the continued rumors that terrorist organizations are seeking to obtain biological weapons.

Science Daily - [PLoS Pathogens] - Researchers have demonstrated a technique that has the potential to reduce the toxicity of vaccines and to make smaller doses more effective???Developing vaccines is fraught with challenges, particularly because many candidates carry a high risk of toxic side effects. For example, twenty percent of people immunized against smallpox will suffer side effects???.
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Scripps Howard - Getting useful tips from biochemical soup left over from an anthrax, plague or botulism toxin attack might sound like an impossible task, but scientists at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories are able to find many of them.
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Wired - A virtual pandemic hits New Mexico: Inside the Los Alamos weapons lab, massive computer simulations unleash disease and track its course, 6 billion people at a time. A look at how simulation is aiding biodefense efforts.
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CIDRAP - Before adjourning last week, the US Senate passed and sent to President Bush a bill providing $3.8 billion for pandemic influenza preparedness and a controversial liability shield for those who produce and administer drugs and vaccines used in a declared public health emergency.
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Wall Street Journal - The U.S. government plans to spend at least $1 billion on new facilities to fight bioterrorism over the next decade???The government plans to build seven large new buildings housing laboratories for research designated “biosafety level-4
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Yomiuri Shimbun - The Japanese government will establish within three years conditions for the operation of a bio-safety level 4 (BSL4) facility that can isolate for safe handling and study dangerous infectious disease agents.
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Washington Post - An editorial that asks a pertinent question that desperately needs to be answered: “Even today, it still is unclear who in the government — the White House, the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of Health and Human Services — is really in charge of defense against bioterrorism.”
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Ottawa Citizen - Canada needs to do a better job of overseeing the use of micro-organisms and biotechnologies that could be misused by terrorists, says a survey of senior scientists and federal officials.
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Medical News Today - The US Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) released “The Decontamination of Children: Preparedness and Response for Hospital Emergency Departments,” a 27-minute video that trains emergency responders and hospital emergency department staff to decontaminate children after being exposed to hazardous chemicals during a bioterrorist attack or other disaster.
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Indian Country - In this interview with Mann, author of the book ‘1491,’ focuses on the impact disease had in the European colonization of the Americas.

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Reuters - Iraq’s national security adviser said on Saturday he wanted to re-arrest Saddam Hussein’s former top weapons experts, as the U.S. military confirmed the release of 14 more high-ranking detainees.
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Newsweek - Saddam Husseinís top aides just released from prison may have stories to tell. But when it comes to Iraq, who should we trust?
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Marine Corps Times - A government agencyís ruling that the controversial anthrax vaccine is safe should clear the way for resumption of mandatory shots for military personnel, government attorneys argue in a new court filing.
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Infection Control Today [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] - A longer description of the previous paper on the workings of Francisella Tularemia from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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News Wise [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] - A new study found that an extremely infectious pneumonia-like disease in humans slips through the immune systemís usual defense mechanisms.The bacterium at fault, Francisella tularensis, causes the disease tularemia.
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Chicago Tribune - Russia’s reluctance to allow the United States access to nuclear and biological weapons sites severely hinders efforts to secure weapons-grade nuclear material and biological pathogens from terrorists and rogue states, according to a new report released by NATO.
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BBC - Eight former aides to Saddam Hussein - including two women accused of making biological weapons - have been released from US custody in Iraq.

The Times - Saddam’s scientists freed as US house of cards starts to tumble.
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UPI - University of Central Florida scientists say they’ve found a safe and effective method of producing large quantities of anthrax vaccine. The researchers say enough anthrax vaccine to inoculate everyone in the United States could be grown inexpensively and safely with only one acre of tobacco plants.
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Knight Ridder - Having defeated the scourges of smallpox, tuberculosis and polio, U.S. Surgeon General William Stewart confidently told Congress in 1969 that it was time to “close the books on infectious diseases.”

Within a few years, U.S. public health research, funding and manpower, especially at the National Institutes of Health, shifted largely from infectious diseases to chronic ones such as cancer, heart disease and stroke.

Federal public hospitals that specialized in infectious diseases closed as the number of infectious disease courses at public health schools were slowly scaled back.

Decades later, as the nation prepares for a potential avian flu outbreak, those policy changes and complacency in the fight against public health threats have helped to make the United States even more vulnerable to a pandemic or bioterrorist attack.
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Knight Ridder - Although the civilized world has long rejected germ warfare, biotechnology is busting out all over with new ways of tinkering with organs and cells and even DNA. The aim of nearly all the research, most by private companies or academics, is to conjure up medical miracles unimagined a generation ago.

Those same biotechnology advances could double for terrorists and militaries alike.
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Associated Press - A former National Institutes of Health employee was sentenced Friday to house arrest and probation after admitting she made an anthrax threat over a tax dispute.
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Associated Press - The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday confirmed its previous finding that the anthrax vaccine being given to members of the U.S. military is safe and effective.
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Christian Science Monitor - A measure to shield drug manufacturers from lawsuits in an effort to encourage them to develop new vaccines is likely to be quietly attached to a “must pass” defense appropriation bill within the next few days.
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CIDRAP [Journal of the American Medical Association] - Exactly 100 of about 38,000 civilians who received smallpox shots in a federal program in 2003 suffered serious adverse events afterward, signaling that the program successfully screened out most people at risk for complications.
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Boston Globe - Boston public health authorities will propose today sweeping new safety regulations governing more than 1,000 research laboratories working with dangerous germs in universities, hospitals, and biotechnology companies across the city.

The proposed rules emerge 10 months after public disclosure that three Boston University scientists had fallen ill while working with tularemia, a lethal bacterium. City health authorities acknowledged yesterday that the proposal is a direct response to the tularemia exposures, as well as long-festering concerns from neighbors about the development of a high-security lab at BU where scientists would be capable of working with some of the world’s deadliest germs.
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Associated Press - A former university professor convicted of fraud after his report of missing plague bacteria from his lab prompted a bioterrorism scare will be released from a halfway house Jan. 2.
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Wired - The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is funding a series of computer games to help prepare health workers and other first responders facing bioterror attacks, nuclear accidents and pandemics.
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New Yorker - Where and how terrorism begins. Osama bin Ladenís first lessons in jihad.
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Stuff.co.nz - Kiwi scientists are developing a new treatment for anthrax.
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Chicago Tribune - A system that can sample a water supply to quickly detect up to 10 biological toxins has been created and is intended to protect water supplies at U.S. military bases, embassies and other sensitive installations.
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Daily Press - In a two-year span, the nation’s only licensed anthrax vaccine maker went from pleading poverty to announcing $100 million in acquisitions, including other pharmaceutical companies and a new manufacturing plant near Washington, D.C.

It’s a pattern that’s worked well for BioPort Corp.: Tell the Pentagon or Congress that it doesn’t have the money to keep going, negotiate a new deal, then count the extra cash rolling in.
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Daily Press - The Pentagon never told Congress about more than 20,000 hospitalizations involving troops who’d taken the anthrax vaccine, despite repeated promises that such cases would be publicly disclosed.
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UPI - The Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee has developed a biodefense cocktail which activates the immune system against viruses and bacteria.
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National Press Club - At the National Press Club today, a panel of three internationally known biodefense experts and vaccine thought- leaders discussed the implementation of Project BioShield, the procurement process for biodefense vaccines, and recommendations regarding the need for a science-driven, systematic and impartial process for comparing the risks and benefits of current and new medical countermeasures to protect America from biological threats.

The panel recommended the adoption of an independent advisory oversight board be included in the decision making process for government-funded biodefense programs because federal policy and planning, rather than traditional market forces, drive the development of public health countermeasures.
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GCN - The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has awarded a pair of contracts totaling $68.4 million to Science Applications International Corp. to help implement and support CDCís BioSense national syndromic surveillance program.
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Reuters [Clinical Infectious Diseases] - About three quarters of patients with monkeypox have affected lymph nodes, a condition that is rare in cases of smallpox or chicken pox, investigators report in two articles in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. Other common features of monkeypox, in addition to rash and fever, include chills, sore throat, headache and muscle pain. Considered a possible agent of bioterrorism, it is important to recognize signs and symptoms of monkeypox and to differentiate it from other pox virus infections
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Wall Street Journal - The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday examined the role Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has played since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to direct funding to drug companies to produce biodefense medicines.
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Reuters - Hospitals are not prepared to handle the patients who would arrive after a disaster or a pandemic, most states have few plans in place for coping, and the federal government has not taken charge of such preparation, according to a report released by Trust for America’s Health.

CIDRAP: Public health preparedness still lagging, group says.
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Washington Post - The voluntary smallpox vaccination campaign announced by President Bush three years ago did not produce the plethora of side effects many in the medical community feared, an analysis released yesterday found. But it remains a mystery why a few dozen adults who were inoculated suffered severe, and in some cases fatal, heart complications.
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Associated Press - When an anthrax slide broke in an eighth grade science class two weeks ago, school officials locked down Wilton-Lyndeborough Cooperative Junior-Senior High School for four hours, with no explanation to terrified pupils, teachers or parents.
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Infection Control Today [Journal of the American Medical Association] - There was a low rate of life-threatening adverse reactions to the smallpox vaccine administered to potential first responders to a bioterrorism incident, possibly attributable to rigorous vaccine safety screening and educational programs, according to a study to be published in the Dec. 7, 2005 issue of JAMA.
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The Australian - The US Food Marketing Institute has partnered with an Australian technology company to help its members meet tough requirements of the US’s Bioterrorism Act.
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Lincoln Tribune - A computerized system developed by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and N.C. Division of Public Health experts to detect bioterrorism and infectious disease outbreaks has received a prestigious national award for excellence.
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Associated Press - The Bush administration asked a federal appeals court Thursday to reinstate mandatory anthrax inoculations for many military personnel.
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Mercury News - A bill moving through Congress to speed production of bird-flu vaccines and other drugs has ignited alarm from critics who claim it would not only shield manufacturers from lawsuits, but also prevent the public from learning if the medicines hurt people more than help.
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Globe and Mail [Nature] - A team of scientists may have cracked the mystery of the reservoir or source of the deadly Ebola virus, finding evidence of the virus in three species of fruit bats in Gabon and the Republic of Congo.

BBC - Fruit bats may carry Ebola virus
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Radio Netherlands - The Netherlands appears to have taken the lead in the quest to develop a tool to mitigate the effects of bioterrorism: an instrument that can measure the presence in the air of biological warfare agents. In real-time that is; and therein lies the novelty and significance of the patented invention.
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