U.S. Response:  Army, NIH Plan New Research Facilities

The U.S. Army and the National Institutes of Health plan to build new biological defense research facilities at Fort Detrick, Md., the current home of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, officials said yesterday (see GSN, April 10).

USAMRIID will add a facility to expand the unit’s research capabilities, said Fort Detrick commander Maj. Gen. Lester Martinez-Lopez, and NIH plans to build its own facility at Fort Detrick that will have a biosafety level-4 rating.  Such a level of protection will permit researchers to work with the most dangerous pathogens, according to the Associated Press.

Funds for the $105 million NIH facility will come from the $1.5 billion President George W. Bush has proposed giving NIH for bioterrorism defense research in fiscal 2003, said Jack Killen, assistant director for biological defense research at the NIH National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (see GSN, March 15).

“This is a new need for us, to be moving into biodefense research,” Killen said (David Dishneau, Associated Press, April 11). 

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Threat Assessment:  Biological Advances Must Be Countered, Expert Says

By Greg Seigle
Global Security Newswire

BALTIMORE — U.S. scientists must advance their biology skills to fight a future set of as-yet unidentified bacteria that could be used as biological weapons, a leading biological defense expert told Global Security Newswire Monday.

“Five years from now it’s not going to be anthrax we’re worried about, it’s going to be something else,” said Tara O’Toole, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies.

“What people are not understanding is how fast biology is moving forward and what that is going to mean for potential biological weapons.”

Future advancements in genetic fingerprinting will enable scientists anywhere, including those who might be associated with terrorists, to understand whole new strands of bacteria, O’Toole said.

While most if not all research on bacteria is conducted for peaceful, medical purposes, the knowledge gained from such research could be used to employ new bacteria or even viruses in harmful ways, she said.

“We have identified — not characterized, not understood, not studied — but identified less than 1 percent of all the bacteria in the world,” O’Toole said.

“Now these new techniques allow you to basically fingerprint whole populations of bacteria,” O’Toole said.  “The fact is you can get the genome of the 1918 flu bug that killed millions on the Internet.”

In addition to genetically modified biological weapons, which countries such as Iran are suspected of developing (see GSN, Nov. 30, 2001), technologies for dispersing agents more rapidly and effectively are moving at a fast pace, according to O’Toole.

“Techniques for manipulating organisms create the possibility of engineering bacteria and viruses so that they can be more virulent and evade traditional diagnostic methods,” she said.

“Technologies for drug delivery — patches for your skin, inhaling your insulin — are going to be fantastic medically speaking,” she continued.  “However, it could be possible to coat molecules or bacteria in ways that make it likely that they would be inhaled into the deep lung and absorbed by the bloodstream.”

In coming decades the United States could make it “impossible” for biological weapons to be effective as weapons of mass lethality, but only if the country pours $10 billion to $30 billion a year into the public health sector to hire the top-notch officials and train them vigorously, O’Toole said (see GSN, April 9).

The country would need to increase current funding proposals drastically and greatly boost the capabilities of both public health systems and health care facilities to accomplish this task, she said.

Beginning next year the National Institutes for Health is slated to spend $1.73 billion on research and development related to infectious diseases such as anthrax and smallpox, according to NIH officials (see GSN, Feb. 6).   Of those funds $441 million is expected to fund basic research into anthrax and smallpox and how the body reacts to them.

This focus on anthrax and smallpox is a major flaw, O’Toole said, calling it a short-term solution.  Soon scientists are going to have to explore the multitude of other bacteria and viruses that terrorists or rogue states could manipulate for use as biological weapons, she said.

“Most people have not yet woken up to how serious this is, or to the recognition that we’re in a whole new era,” O’Toole said, adding that another biological weapons attack on a larger scale than last fall’s anthrax mailings might be what it takes to spurn a crisis-like effort for the country to prepare for bioterrorism properly.

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Anthrax:  USAMRIID to Assist in “Amerithrax” Investigation

U.S. biological weapons scientists will soon begin comparing the genetic makeup of anthrax samples taken from U.S. laboratories with that of samples taken from the letters used in last fall’s attacks, Newhouse News Service reported today (see GSN, April 9).

The researchers, from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease at Fort Detrick, Md., will also examine the coating used to weaponize the anthrax spores for any further clues about who might be responsible, Newhouse reported.

Experts, however, said genetic evidence could provide few leads for the FBI’s “Amerithrax” investigation.  Even if some leads are discovered, genetic fingerprinting is still too new and prone to errors to stand up in court, they said.

“If I were a defense attorney, I would raise questions about the error rate of DNA technologies,” said Abigail Salyers, president of the American Society for Microbiology.

The genetic fingerprinting process itself might cause problems, said Jill Trewhella, head of the bioscience division at Los Alamos National Laboratory.  In order for scientists to study DNA fragments, they must first make copies, a process that can introduce errors, according to Newhouse.

“What’s the degree of certainty you can have comparing a DNA sequence or chemical signatures of different labs?  This is not known.  It’s happening now,” Salyers said, adding she is planning a conference in June to develop forensic guidelines for bioterrorism investigations.

The FBI has worked to ensure that any scientific evidence in the Amerithrax investigation, including genetic evidence, will stand up to scrutiny in court, according to an FBI official.

“We have extremely top-of-the-line experts in pathogens, molecular biology and analytical chemistry,” said Van Harp, head of the FBI investigation.

The FBI might have to rely on scientific evidence for a big break in its investigation because thousands of interviews and a reward of $2.5 million have provided little information, Newhouse reported.

“We all agree that the scientific analysis will be the key to identifying the source of the anthrax and putting the pieces together,” said Kevin Donovan, head of the FBI’s New York Office (Kevin Coughlin, Newhouse News Service, April 10).

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U.S. Response:  Bioterror Could Be Made “Impossible,” Expert Says

By Greg Seigle
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The United States could make it “impossible” for biological agents to be used as effective weapons of terror if the country spends $10 billion to $30 billion a year to revamp its ailing public health system, one of the nation’s leading biological defense experts told Global Security Newswire yesterday.

Tara O’Toole, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, said infectious diseases will probably never be eradicated, but their use as weapons of mass destruction could be virtually eliminated if the United States invests sufficient resources into the public health sector in the next two or three decades.

“If we figure out enough counters to the threats [so] that it would be impossible to use a biological weapon as a weapon of mass lethality,” O’Toole said during a wide-ranging interview.

“Twenty years from now, [if terrorists] have a disease that can kill everybody, I’m going to be able to take that disease the first time it hits, diagnose it, take it apart, and figure out the cure and the vaccine within 24 hours,” she said.

Such drastic and unprecedented improvements to both public health agencies and health care providers could only result if President George W. Bush implements a national defense policy that places biological defense as a top priority, injecting large amounts of cash that would still only be a fraction of budgets given to the Defense Department and homeland security efforts, O’Toole said.

“We can do this.  We are America.  We are the best in bioresearch,” O’Toole said.  “We have enormous advantages in terms of talent and infrastructure.”

The $2.2 billion the United States is providing for biological defense this year is deceptively low funding, mainly because $1 billion of those funds are earmarked for diluting and creating more smallpox vaccine, O’Toole said.

Once that $1 billion for vaccines is lopped off, only $700 million is going to the nation’s 5,000 hospitals — funds that need to be divided among the 50 states, she said.

“It sounds like a lot of money but it’s nothing compared to the need,” O’Toole said.

“We’ve got the Department of Defense Secretary [Donald Rumsfeld] saying that what he worries most about is bioterrorism.  Then the next word is that we’re spending $700 million for bioterrorism preparedness?  Let’s get in the same ballpark,” she said.

“The increase in the [Defense] budget this year that Bush is asking for is $48 billion,” she added.  “Not only that, we’ve got to come from a standing start.  This is not a budget that’s been nourished throughout the Cold War to some degree of minimal competency.  This is public health.  It has been starved for the past decades.  It doesn’t have the fundamental talent that the military has been able to attract.”

Attracting “the best and brightest” minds into the field of biological defense is one of O’Toole’s main goals.

A recent American Hospital Association report said it would cost $12 billion for all U.S. hospitals to achieve the “rudimentary capability” to handle a biological weapons attack.

Another study in Maryland after a high-rise fire found that all of the state’s hospitals combined could provide only 100 ventilators on a given day.

“Seven hundred million dollars is not a huge amount of money.  It sounds like an enormous amount of money in terms of public health.  [But] $10 million would go very quickly in Maryland,” O’Toole said.

Because 36 states are currently mired in a recession and have hiring freezes, states such as Maryland are simply shuffling resources from one area to another, O’Toole said.

The United States, she said, needs to get “the laws changed so you can hire people through more svelte, less agonizing routes … there have to be new conduits for bringing in the talents.”

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Anthrax:  Thousands of Suspects Possible, Law Enforcement Official Says

There could be “thousands” of potential suspects in the FBI “Amerithrax” investigation into last fall’s anthrax attacks, many more than previously believed, a senior law enforcement official said yesterday (see GSN, April 8).

A recent government analysis of the anthrax spores found in a letter mailed to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) indicates that the spores were more sophisticated than any samples previously seen.  The analysis has led investigators to examine the laboratories capable of producing such spores, of which there could be hundreds, according to the FBI.

The investigation into who is responsible for last fall’s anthrax attacks is still centered within the United States, although investigators have not ruled out the involvement of foreign scientists or laboratories, said federal authorities.  They added that they do not expect the investigation to be completed anytime soon (Kevin Johnson, USA Today, April 9).

The FBI, so far, has few leads and little evidence to work with, according to U.S. News & World Report.

Less than a gram of spores was recovered from the Leahy letter.  FBI agents have used a list of 80 questions in their conversations with 5,000 “persons of interest,” including 600 people with specific scientific knowledge, according to U.S. News.  The FBI also has doubled the reward offered in the case to $2.5 million in an attempt to generate more tips (Chitra Ragavan, U.S. News & World Report, April 15).

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Anthrax:  Spores Are More Sophisticated Than Previously Thought, Analysis Says

A new government analysis has found that the person responsible for last fall’s anthrax attacks might have succeeded in creating a more sophisticated form of weaponized anthrax than any previously seen, Newsweek reported this week (see GSN, April 3).

U.S. officials said that the anthrax spores found in the letter mailed to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) were ground more finely than U.S. biological weapons scientists have achieved (see GSN, Nov. 27, 2001).  The spores also were coated in a chemical compound unknown to biological weapons experts and matched no coatings on anthrax samples ever found, including those taken from Iraq and the former Soviet Union, they said.

The extremely fine milling and unique chemical coating produced particles so small and fluffy that investigators detected individually coated spores in the Leahy letter envelope — something never before seen by experts, according to Newsweek.

Meanwhile, it is now less likely that the genetic code of the anthrax used in the attacks might provide a clue as to the person responsible, Newsweek reported  (see GSN, Feb. 13).  The strain of anthrax used in the Leahy letter can be traced back to an anthrax outbreak in Texas cattle during the 1970s (see GSN, Jan. 29), whose samples were widely distributed, according to insiders (see GSN, Dec. 12, 2001).

Investigators also have questioned the FBI profile of the suspect, which describes a scientist once involved with the U.S. biological weapons research program (see GSN, Feb. 26).  It appears unlikely that any former U.S. government scientist had the ability, or access to the needed equipment, to produce the sophisticated spores found in the Leahy letter, they said (Newsweek, April 15).

Lack of Samples Cited

Researchers working on new anthrax detection technologies have said they are making slow progress because of a lack of anthrax samples with which to conduct tests, according to Newhouse News Service.

“This has been a constant frustration,” said David Perlin, science director for the Public Health Research Institute in New Jersey.  Researchers there are developing a new technology that could confirm exposure to anthrax in less than an hour.

Since last fall’s anthrax attacks, applications for anthrax samples for research have come under increased scrutiny, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which oversees the transfer of pathogens such as anthrax (see GSN, Feb. 20).

“Applications are more scrutinized than ever before,” said CDC spokesman Llelwyn Grant.

Perlin said he has tried to obtain anthrax DNA samples from both the CDC and the New York state and municipal health departments.  The DNA is needed to make modifications on a detection technology originally intended for use with tuberculosis and HIV, he said, adding that the modifications would only take a few weeks to complete.

Perlin has accused the CDC of playing favorites with its transfers of pathogen samples, according to Newhouse.  In November, Roche Diagnostics and the Mayo Clinic announced they had developed a new anthrax detection system created with the aid of anthrax samples from the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“They won’t make materials available to anyone with a competing technology,” Perlin said.  The CDC has denied any bias in its transfer of samples, according to Grant.

Before a 1996 law increased CDC oversight, transferring pathogen samples was easy, scientists said.

“There was a time when you could just meet somebody at some scientific meeting and say, ‘I’d like to use some of this,’ and you’d put it in a vial and they’d drive down and you’d give it to them,” said Richard Crosland, a former scientist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md.  “I’d do it myself.”

After the anthrax attacks, though, some researchers have said they are not concerned with increased restrictions on pathogen transfers, even if research progress does slow, said Ronald Atlas, president-elect of the American Society for Microbiology (Kevin Coughlin, Newhouse News Service, March 2002).

New Vaccines in Development

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical company BioPort, the sole U.S. producer of anthrax vaccine, has been developing a new and improved vaccine over the past year, according to NewsRx.com (see GSN, Feb. 1).

“Based on the experience of the past three years, we’re in a unique position,” BioPort spokeswoman Kim Brennen Root told the Lansing State Journal.  “We have every intention of moving forward with a next-generation vaccine candidate.”

The new BioPort anthrax vaccine could be administered through a nasal spray instead of through injection, according to NewsRx.com.  The new vaccine also would only need three doses over a two- to three-month period instead of six doses in an 18-month period.

“It’s only logical to pursue something that would work more quickly, said Brian Strom, chairman of a National Academy of Sciences committee that researched the safety of the current anthrax vaccine (see GSN, March 7).

The U.S. National Institutes of Health is expected to start human clinical trials by this fall on its own new anthrax vaccine, according to NewsRx.com (see GSN, March 15).  The trials will examine the safety of the vaccine, including any potential side effects.  The NIH project to develop a new vaccine began five years ago (NewsRx.com, April 8).

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