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MARCH 18, 2003 SECURITY NET By Alex Salkever Defending against Walking Germ Bombs While the new deadly pneumonia most likely isn't terrorism, the outbreak shows that America needs a new bio-border-patrol
Unlike the West Nile Virus, which sparked major worries on the East Coast last summer, SARS can apparently travel quite nicely on man-made birds rather than relying on the feathered variety. Although WHO suspects that SARS originated in China, pockets of the illness have been reported in Hanoi, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and several other countries. I'm confident that the appearance of this plague as George Bush gears up to bash Saddam Hussein is only a coincidence and not a Biblical visitation of a plague upon the world's house. That said, the lesson implicit in this unfolding tale is crystal clear: In an era of intercontinental jet travel, everyone is exposed to the breath of a disease carrier, separated only by several degrees of personal contact. A desperate, immoral person could leverage that connectivity to foist a deadly illness upon the world. After all, bacteria allies with no state. Germs don't need a passport to cross borders. STILL HIT OR MISS. To best ensure America's national security, officials need to better prepare -- technologically and organizationally -- for an era when suicide bombers can penetrate defenses bearing not plastic explosives but viruses. For that reason, the U.S. should draw a biological line at its borders and test people coming into the country beforehand somehow, rather than waiting until they land in the emergency room after exposing half a city to their bug. That's a tall order. Spotting biological pathogens even in concentrated quantities remains a hit or miss proposition, despite the deployment of a new crop of detection equipment. That's not for lack of trying. Dozens of companies large and small are researching technologies designed to spot even minute indications of germ warfare. They're trying a smorgasbord of approaches from handheld devices that can perform complicated DNA tests in 20 minutes or less to far more simple strips of treated paper coated with antibodies that react to the presence of deadly germs, such as small pox and bubonic plague. PointSource Technologies in Escondido, Calif., has built a system it claims can detect germs or radioactive matter in water supplies in real time by firing laser beams at water that can spot even tiny bacterial organisms suspended in the liquid. Other companies are building devices that could function like a breathalyzer that lights up in the presence of germs instead of alcohol. UNWITTING WARRIOR. Still, spotting disease-carriers seeking to sicken society will prove plenty difficult. All these suicide bombers will need to do is ride a municipal bus or train system with a particularly virulent disease. Such deadly germ warriors don't even need to know just what they're carrying or for whom they're "fighting." Even granted that the SARS illness almost certainly has natural origins, imagine this scenario: Iraqi security-service officers single out a female French peacenik working in Baghdad who's about to go home to Paris. They know her itinerary and where she's staying. As she sleeps, they spray her with a large dose of a particularly virulent, lethal disease. She leaves the next day none the wiser but packing a payload no peacenik would want to carry. Customs would have no reason to stop her. She might face heightened scrutiny but nothing comparable to what a Middle Eastern man might face upon landing at Orly. She would have no idea that she's working for the enemy, that Saddam has turned her into a germ warrior. Two days later while she's kicking back in cafés and trooping around on the subway, her symptoms emerge. Doctors might start to get a inkling of what has happened, but far too late to prevent exposure. Physicians scramble to contain the disease. The entire city of Paris is quarantined. The disease, however, is already spreading to the rest of Europe and around the World. All the tanks and missiles aimed at Saddam are useless for dealing with a full-blown, deadly epidemic.
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