Bioweapons a threat, says speaker

One hundred kilograms of Anthrax dropped on Washington, D.C., would be as deadly as a… One hundred kilograms of Anthrax dropped on Washington, D.C., would be as deadly as a one-megaton hydrogen bomb.

This is one of the many reasons why Dr. Tara O’Toole believes that the use of biological weapons is “potentially imminent.”

O’Toole is the CEO of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. She was also the final speaker in the 50th Anniversary Scientific Symposium, “Remembering Polio: The History and Future of Vaccine Development,” presented Tuesday.

O’Toole discussed bioweapons in her lecture “Disease as a Weapon: A New Challenge for the 21st Century.” The speech, full of cautionary words and threats of unavoidable disaster, fell upon the ears of an Alumni Hall audience Tuesday afternoon.

Bioweapons have been proven to work on a large scale; they can kill hundreds of thousands of people at one time. Generally, it is difficult to determine where a bioweapon was let loose, so an exact radius of destruction is hard to calculate, according to O’Toole.

In response to a question from a man in the audience pertaining to biological warfare, O’Toole was quick to point out that her lecture had nothing to do with that subject.

“Biological warfare is not effective,” O’Toole said, agreeing with the man’s claim. “But biological weapons, when you do not care about how many people you kill, are effective.”

In O’Toole’s eyes, the goals behind the use of bioweapons are quite different than those of standard weapons, because civilians are now often the targets of attacks. Also, attackers want to maximize the amount of casualties with each assault. What makes these goals too easy to achieve — and the threat so real — is the availability of information on the topic of bioweapons.

“Most of what is needed to build bioweapons can be found in open literature,” O’Toole said.

In terms of biology, the same knowledge that is used to make a vaccine to immunize a person from a potentially deadly disease can be harnessed to create a disease that is resistant to vaccines.

“We can’t just classify the dark side of biology and go merrily about improving biomedicine,” said O’Toole, who believes strongly that both the good and bad about biological research are tied together.

While the U.S. could bankrupt itself in an attempt to protect all potential locations at risk, there is still a need to fortify the country against the possibility of an attack with bioweapons, she said.

“This is not a tsunami response effort,” O’Toole said. “This is a national security priority.”

O’Toole believes that the best course of action to prevent an epidemic is to better prepare hospitals for emergency situations. In her opinion, hospitals should have a regional response capacity and be able to communicate freely with the public health authority and other doctors in the case of an epidemic.

Dr. John Mahoney, assistant dean for medical education at Pitt, agrees with O’Toole, and for this reason, he developed a plan to introduce emergency management into the medical education curriculum.

The institution of coursework in “Medical Management of Biological and Chemical Casualties” led Pitt to be the first civilian school in the United States to have such a program.

“Preparing the health workforce, not just physicians but everyone in the healthcare field, is an important part of the broader preparedness effort,” Mahoney said. “In fact, I would go so far as to say that it’s essential.”

Mahoney believes that one of the best ways to prepare for a large-scale attack is to treat it as an influenza outbreak. It is necessary to see the parallels between everyday events and bigger attacks. This, he said, is the approach taken by the curriculum that he designed.

“You have to think about it broadly,” Mahoney said. “How do I prepare for things that are more common than attacks?”