Post by ruth on Jan 16, 2006 19:46:32 GMT -5
Top U.S. Disease Fighters Warn of New Engineered Pathogens but Call Bioweapons Doomsday Unlikely
By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON — The top officials charged with protecting the United States against a biological attack yesterday played down concerns that a new agent could exterminate the human race but warned that the threat of new, engineered pathogens remains serious (see GSN, July 13).
“As the power of biological science and technology continues to grow, it will become increasingly possible that we will face an attack with a pathogen that has been deliberately engineered for increased virulence,” National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci said in prepared testimony to the House of Representatives Homeland Security Subcommittee on Prevention of Nuclear and Biological Attack.
Concern has risen in Washington in recent years that a terrorist group or unfriendly country could employ increasingly available bioengineering know-how to design a new agent to be particularly potent or to resist existing antibiotics.
Agents could be made more virulent through “resistance to one or more antibiotic or antiviral drugs, increased infectiousness or pathogenicity or, in the somewhat longer term, a new virulent pathogen made by combining genes from more than one organism,” Fauci said. Development of therapies and vaccines with broad applications and more research into human immune function are under way as part of the effort to counter the threat, he said.
Asked by Representative Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) whether a pathogen could be engineered that would be virulent enough to “wipe out all of humanity,” Fauci and other top officials at the hearing said such an agent was technically feasible but in practice unlikely.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Julie Gerberding said a deadly agent could be engineered with relative ease that could spread throughout the world if left unchecked, but that the outbreak would be unlikely to defeat countries’ detection and response systems.
“The technical obstacles are really trivial,” Gerberding said. “What’s difficult is the distribution of agents in ways that would bypass our capacity to recognize and intervene effectively.”
Fauci said creating an agent whose transmissibility could be sustained on such a scale, even as authorities worked to counter it, would be a daunting task.
“Would you end up with a microbe that functionally will … essentially wipe out everyone from the face of the Earth? … It would be very, very difficult to do that,” he said.
By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON — The top officials charged with protecting the United States against a biological attack yesterday played down concerns that a new agent could exterminate the human race but warned that the threat of new, engineered pathogens remains serious (see GSN, July 13).
“As the power of biological science and technology continues to grow, it will become increasingly possible that we will face an attack with a pathogen that has been deliberately engineered for increased virulence,” National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci said in prepared testimony to the House of Representatives Homeland Security Subcommittee on Prevention of Nuclear and Biological Attack.
Concern has risen in Washington in recent years that a terrorist group or unfriendly country could employ increasingly available bioengineering know-how to design a new agent to be particularly potent or to resist existing antibiotics.
Agents could be made more virulent through “resistance to one or more antibiotic or antiviral drugs, increased infectiousness or pathogenicity or, in the somewhat longer term, a new virulent pathogen made by combining genes from more than one organism,” Fauci said. Development of therapies and vaccines with broad applications and more research into human immune function are under way as part of the effort to counter the threat, he said.
Asked by Representative Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) whether a pathogen could be engineered that would be virulent enough to “wipe out all of humanity,” Fauci and other top officials at the hearing said such an agent was technically feasible but in practice unlikely.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Julie Gerberding said a deadly agent could be engineered with relative ease that could spread throughout the world if left unchecked, but that the outbreak would be unlikely to defeat countries’ detection and response systems.
“The technical obstacles are really trivial,” Gerberding said. “What’s difficult is the distribution of agents in ways that would bypass our capacity to recognize and intervene effectively.”
Fauci said creating an agent whose transmissibility could be sustained on such a scale, even as authorities worked to counter it, would be a daunting task.
“Would you end up with a microbe that functionally will … essentially wipe out everyone from the face of the Earth? … It would be very, very difficult to do that,” he said.