Bio-Chem Hype Spreads Like a New Form of Infectious Disease

There’s something in the air, and it is spreading. You can’t walk down a street or go to work without being exposed. Worse yet, it’s reaching your kids. It’s not a chemical or biological agent. It’s fear.

It is, however, a fear all out of proportion to reality. It is fear based on hype, and sadly, some of the hype is driven by parochial interest. Thursday’s report of an isolated case of anthrax will only make things worst.

First, consider the facts. Chemical weapons have been with us since World War I. Biological weapons have an even longer history, stretching back centuries to the Peloponnesian War and, more famously, to early America when Indian tribes were supplied with blankets infected with smallpox. Despite this long history, biological and chemical weapons have rarely been used, and then only by countries. No country, however, would attack the U.S. with such weapons for fear of nuclear retaliation. There has not been a single death due to a bio-attack by terrorists.

Casualties from a terrorist chemical attack are almost as rare. Only once has a terrorist group used chemical weapons to deadly effect--the 1995 attack by the Aum Supreme Truth, a Japanese cult. Even in that case, the attack was more failure than success; 12 people were killed in a crowded Tokyo subway. Had they used a traditional high explosive, the death toll would have been far greater. Many warned that Aum’s attack would set off a wave of chemical attacks. That didn’t happen.

Politicians and the media would have us believing the worst. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, who threw the city of Boston into a panic Sept. 21 when he warned of a possible attack, continues to use inflammatory rhetoric about chemical-biological terrorism. His aides admit that there is no new intelligence to substantiate such claims. His warnings seem to coincide with testimony aimed at getting passage of sweeping new anti-terrorism laws.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is a little more cautious. He claims that terrorists will eventually acquire such weapons from countries. What he fails to mention is that no country has ever provided a weapon of mass destruction to a terrorist group. They do not give them to groups over which they have limited control and which might use the weapons against them later.

The media treatment of bio-chem terrorism has been predictable and regrettable. This is particularly true of television, which cannot resist showing images of gas masks and exploding canisters. The typical story begins with dire warnings about the consequences of a perfectly executed chemical or biological attack. This is followed by interviews with public health officials who solemnly declare that the U.S. is unprepared for such an attack. Only at the very end is the viewer told that the risk of such an attack is exceedingly small. By then the damage is done.

If bio-chem threats are being hyped, why aren’t there more voices of caution? There are two reasons. First, there is no cost to being a Cassandra. If the dire predictions do not come true, the analyst simply can say that we have been lucky. By contrast, the person who suggests that the threats are overblown is taking a career-threatening risk. One attack--even if it fails, even if it employs a household cleaner rather than sarin or anthrax--would be viewed as having proved the skeptic wrong.

There is a second, less obvious reason. There is an unwritten rule among the small fraternity of people who study weapons of mass destruction. When colleagues engage in hype, many of us will turn a deaf ear rather than publicly contradict them. We tell ourselves that hyping the threat is the only way to get the attention of the U.S. public and therefore a necessary evil.

Sept. 11 changed all that. Today, bio-chem hype has real consequences. It is needlessly scaring our children. It is being used to justify a variety of questionable public policy proposals, and worse, it may actually encourage terrorists to consider these weapons.

Yes, we should reduce the danger of a biological or chemical attack. We can improve the public health infrastructure and, in particular, the worldwide monitoring of infectious disease. We can work on vaccines and techniques to prevent advances in the lab from becoming new weapons. Finally, the Bush administration should reverse course and support the chemical weapons and the biological weapons treaties, which aim to reduce the risks of biological and chemical warfare.

The infectious disease gripping the U.S. is fear. Left untreated, this disease may have disastrous consequences--for public policy, for the economy and for our daily lives and the lives of our children.