A Useful Anthrax Scare

Experts say that Larry Wayne Harris, the Ohio microbiologist arrested last week on charges of possessing the deadly anthrax germ for use as a weapon, carried a harmless anthrax-based veterinary vaccine instead. Harris’ arrest, nevertheless, was not a false alarm. He himself contends biological weapons go virtually unregulated in the United States and abroad, and he is absolutely right.

What’s needed is a strengthened Biological Weapons Convention. That is the toothless 1975 treaty that allows its more than 140 signatory nations to test biological warfare agents for defense purposes and requires that they merely “consult and cooperate to resolve disputes.” Under the treaty, an American biotechnology firm legally supplied Iraq with 70 shipments of anthrax and other extremely deadly pathogens in the late 1980s, before the Gulf War. At least half a dozen other countries have developed advanced biological weapons programs in recent years.

The United States has been reluctant to tighten the Biological Weapons Convention, largely because domestic drug and biotechnology companies have resisted proposed requirements that would allow foreign inspectors to visit U.S. plants and perhaps learn proprietary secrets. In recent months, however, most industry leaders have agreed to accept a type of monitoring called “managed access,” in which producers are allowed to partially conceal sensitive areas of their work. There appear to be no solid reasons for the United States to delay pressing for a new convention. As with the U.S.-Russian strategic arms reduction treaties, agreement on biological weapons would allow inspections that ease international tensions.

To thwart biological terrorism domestically, the Defense Department should establish a program to train FBI agents and local law enforcement and health officials to recognize signs of biological weapons production, like large orders of dangerous chemicals and suspicious outbreaks of disease.

No inspection system is perfect. Dangerous microbes can be transported in a test tube or tucked away in a container in a shirt pocket, and their production should not be banned outright because the same organisms that can kill thousands have legitimate medical and industrial uses.

Even so, inspection is the first line of defense. Programs to control biological weapons are vital. There is no weapon more lethal than the killer in the test tube.