Silent killers in the biological arsenal

2 Dec, 2002 11:42 AM3 mins to read

By ANGELA GREGORY

A middle-aged man infected with smallpox arrives at Auckland Airport from Los Angeles.

He feels well, no symptoms have developed, and he does not know he is carrying the dangerous virus, which kills up to 30 per cent of its victims.

The businessman makes a week-long journey up and down the country, staying in the major centres.

The disease starts to spread from person to person and soon New Zealand is another victim of a bioterrorist attack that originated in the United States.

It sounds like a seventies made-for-television scare plot.

But such a scenario, unlikely as it may be, has been considered by public health specialists.

Wellington public health physician Dr Nick Wilson published a paper this year looking at the potential impact of bioterrorism in New Zealand.

It followed the use of bioweapons in the United States last year, when mail contaminated with potentially lethal anthrax was sent to several public figures.

Dr Wilson said bioweapons, including smallpox, plague and genetically engineered organisms, could spread to New Zealand.

A recent exercise involving a supposed bioterrorist attack on the United States had shown how smallpox could spread to 25 American states and 15 countries within 13 days.

The exercise found that after three months and the depletion of vaccine stocks, there would be an estimated three million cases, one million deaths and civil disorder as Government efforts to control the situation collapsed.

But Dr Wilson said the threat posed by terrorism in New Zealand paled in comparison with other public health concerns, such as premature death from smoking.

He also conservatively estimated that in the absence of large-scale health interventions, 800 to 4100 New Zealanders were expected to die in the next global influenza pandemic - for which health authorities were already running coping trials.

Dr Wilson said historical evidence and the characteristics of bioweapons suggested it was unlikely terrorists would use them to produce mass casualties.

But an outbreak of smallpox in the Northern Hemisphere would pose some risk of spread to New Zealand. Likewise, terrorist use of pneumonic plague and genetically engineered pathogens could lead to imported cases reaching New Zealand.

"However a range of disease control measures are available that could substantially limit the size of any resulting outbreaks."

The Ministry of Health has said it is considering buying smallpox vaccines but considers the risk of the virus being used in a biological attack as minute.

The ministry's manager of public health programmes, Graeme Gillespie, said a more effective type of vaccine with fewer side-effects than those at present available would could be purchased when it became available.

Health Minister Annette King has said the present smallpox vaccine had serious side-effects and would not be distributed without careful consideration of the benefits.

In the unlikely event of a health emergency, the Government had public health and emergency systems to deal with it.

Herald feature: Defence

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