biocrime

The intentional use of biological pathogens to kill or incapacitate one 's enemies has occurred sporadically for centuries . One of the earliest documented cases occurred at the Crimean port city of Kaffa (now Feodosia , Ukraine ) in 1346 . Besieging Tatar armies were stricken with bubonic plague and decided to turn this unfortunate incident to their advantage by catapulting plague-rid den corpses into the city (Derbes , 1966 . Genoese defenders within the city walls subsequently contracted plague and fled to Italy , thus carrying the disease to Europe . The resulting epidemics culminated in what we now know as

the Black Death , which wiped out nearly one-third of the European population in the Middle Ages

Until recently , concern over biological weapons focused mainly on their use by an adversary on the battlefield . Several events , however , have heightened concerns that these agents could be employed by terrorists As many as 18 countries currently are suspected of having biological-weapons research and development programs (Siegrist , 1999 Of the seven countries listed by the State Department as sponsors of international terrorism , at least five are known or suspected to have bio-weapons programs . Most notably , before the Gulf war , intelligence sources suspected that the Iraqis had a biological weapons program . In 1995 , the Iraqis admitted to having weaponized anthrax , botulinum toxin and aflatoxin (Zilinskas , 1997

Revelations by defectors from the biological weapons program of the former Soviet Union revealed the massive extent of that program including the industrial capacity to produce tons of biological agents such as anthrax and smallpox , each year . The Soviets used the signing of the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972 as a launching point for accelerating their program . Moreover , they also saw the global eradication of smallpox and the subsequent discontinuation of vaccination against the disease as an opportunity to exploit smallpox as a weapon . Since the breakup of the Soviet Union , there has been concern that many of the scientists put out of work by the deteriorating economies of former Soviet states could take their expertise to a country developing a biological warfare program (Alibek and Handelman 1999

A wake-up call came with the 1995 sarin nerve agent attack in the Tokyo subway system by the terrorist organization Aum Shinrikyo . This event demonstrated that terrorist organizations had acquired the ability to use unconventional weapons . It was later revealed that the cult had used sarin once previously in Matsumoto , Japan , in 1994 , and had made several attempts to release the biological agents anthrax and botulinum toxin

Given that a terrorist organization could choose to use conventional chemical , or nuclear weapons , why might it resort to a bioagent ? There are several reasons , which , when considered as a whole , might point to biological weapons as the ultimate terrorist weapons . First , the agents themselves are relatively easy to procure . Organisms such as Clostridium botulinum , the agent that produces botulinum toxin , and hence botulism is ubiquitous in soil . Other organisms , such as Bacillus anthracis , the causative agent of anthrax , and Yersinia pestis , the causative agent of plague , could be collected...