PerspectivesAre you interested in submitting a Perspective Article? Be sure to read The Science Advisory Board's Editorial Guides for Perspective Articles. Click here. Bioterrorism: Is it the Ultimate Revenge Weapon? by David C. White, M.D., Ph.D  The Internet, our newspapers and CNN have been telling us that the next wave of terror will be bioterrorism. One puff from a perfume atomizer in the first victim's face and in a couple of weeks, 100 million of us are sick and dying. Could it happen? It is an incredibly remote possibility with natural human pathogens like typhoid, plague or even anthrax. The world's champion infectious disease (after measles) is influenza. We have a pandemic almost every year, but there has been only one really bad one -- in 1918. Now we can immunize the most susceptible of our population. Even genetically engineered "superbugs" generated against agricultural infestations are far from perfect killers. It is actually hard to get a roaring epidemic started.We live in a messy world full of things that would love to eat the garden of delicious organic molecules that constitutes each of us. We, and our eukaryotic ancestors, have been living in this teeming sea of microbes for 600 million years and have made it so far with our incredible immune system, herd immunity and the wonders of evolutionary selection. Plague without rats and fleas has difficulty becoming pneumonic so it can be inhaled. It has proven very hard to aerosolize effectively. Anthrax spores are probably in your garden soil (beside the tetanus). It is less tricky, but still difficult to aerosolize. Usually an infected person will get a nasty eschar where it grows locally, and it's easily treated if recognized early. The true, diabolical agent is smallpox because we eliminated it from the Earth in one of the triumphs of Public Health. However, we are now a huge mass of "susceptibles," and this disease is a varsity infectious agent. Nevertheless, there is an easy fix -- vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate! So what is there to do? Use the Internet as a bully pulpit to teach biology -- shift evolution in your favor. Stack selection against your microbial enemies. If you don't want to foster "species-jumping" viruses, don't kiss monkeys, fondle snakes and lizards, or encourage farmers to sleep near their pigs, as they do in China. (That's where each new wave of influenza comes from). Don't get chummy with birds or let mosquitoes or ticks near your body if you can help it. Support first class sewage treatment. Insist on clean ozone-free air without molds in damp places to sensitize you. Cook food -- the human race expanded mightily when cooked parasites became food not infectious agents! Soap is the best antibiotic, so use it liberally. A crash vaccination program is a much better investment than an antimissile program to take out the occasional Scud. Let's keep up all those immunizations. Take care of your body -- don't weaken your lungs with tobacco smoke, and let's honor the forgotten heroes of your bodies with a bumper sticker -- have you thanked your white blood cells lately? ### David C. White, M.D., Ph.D UTK/ORNL Distinguished Scientist Center for Biomarker Analysis University of Tennessee 10515 Research Drive, Suite 300 Knoxville, TN 37932-2575 865-974-8001, FAX 865-974-8027 Dwhite1@utk.edu ### Discuss this Perspective in our Discussion Forum! ### Additional Bioterror Resources
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