Modified germs could bring economies to their knees

By GREG ANSLEY

The discovery came by chance and with the best of intentions. Australian researchers had for years been hunting an answer to the plagues of mice that regularly denuded the nation's pastoral stations.

Now they had it: the addition of a gene to the mousepox virus, destroying the immunity of mice to the disease.

But the breakthrough carried far more sinister implications.

Last month Dr Bob Searmark, director of the Cooperative Research Centre for the Biological Control of Pest Animals in Canberra, urged global arms control negotiators to include the discovery in the biological weapons convention.

The technology, he said, could equally be used to create genetically modified organisms - a new, infinitely more deadly smallpox strain, for example - that could be employed as weapons of frightening power.

As Searmark's announcement set international alarm bells jangling, the United States Defence Department released its latest assessment of the threat posed by biological warfare.

For the first time, and building on Australia's potentially lethal agricultural discovery, the department focused on an increasing risk of attack by virus or disease on the West's farm industries.

Agriculture, it concluded, is an inevitable and easy target, able to bring even the largest developed economies to their knees.

Potential assailants range from hostile nations to terrorists, rogue commodity brokers to organised crime, and people with a grudge.

This relatively recent realisation has deepened existing concerns over the use of a frightening arsenal of plagues against humans, some of the worst carried by poultry and livestock.

Nothing to do with harmless little New Zealand, sitting peacefully at the bottom of the world?

Think again.

The illegal importing and release of rabbit calicivirus disease in 1997 alarmed experts in bioterrorism because of the ease with which it was slipped onto the nation's farms and for the speed and lethality of its earlier escape and spread in Australia.

The New Zealand release, said University of California biological warfare researcher Dr Mark Wheelis, demonstrated the availability and effectiveness of bioterrorism to anyone with a determined agenda.

The implications, direct and indirect, for both humans and agriculture are chilling.

Scenario one: No one pays any attention to the tourist patting lambs on a farm visit. Why should they?

On his clothes and shoes is the foot and mouth disease virus.

Scenario two: An Air New Zealand jumbo jet touches down in Auckland.

Its passengers' bags bulge with last-minute shopping from LA International - and their bodies course with rapidly multiplying smallpox virus released into the packed American airport by fanatics with an Armageddon complex.

Neither scenario is any longer unthinkable.

The mechanisms for manufactured plagues of unprecedented scale already exist in the very nature of virus and disease.

In 1918-19 Spanish flu, travelling by sea, road and rail, spread around the world to exact a global toll of about 25 million - 1.6 per cent of the world's population - including an estimated 6700 victims in remote and tiny New Zealand.

In 1957 and 1968 the less lethal but still potent Asian and Hong Kong influenza strains covered the same ground in a fraction of the time, crossing oceans and continents by air to kill hundreds of thousands.

Influenza pandemics are now part of life. Every year more than 20,000 Americans and 1500 Australians die of various flu strains, the most recent of which, Influenza A, is, in the view of most virologists, a mere precursor to a yet-to-appear strain that will vastly eclipse Spanish flu in its toll.

The same potential hangs across agriculture, demonstrated by the accelerating disaster of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and its fatal human offshoot, new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

BSE has not only so far defeated attempts at containment. It has demonstrated the lethality of emerging zoonotic diseases, jumping from animals to humans in virulent new forms such as the avian flu that decimated Hong Kong's chicken industry and killed six people, and nipah virus, carried by bats in Malaysia and threatening to spread throughout Asia.

Nipah, along with blood disease of bananas, citrus greening, classical swine fever, foot and mouth and Japanese encephalitis are endemic in South-east Asia, and are considered by the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service a growing threat to Australia and, by extension, to New Zealand.

Foot and mouth (FMD), avian influenza and classical swine fever are also on the list of livestock pathogens the United States regards as potential weapons of agricultural bioterrorism.

Others are vesicular stomatitis, rinderpest, African swine fever, Rift Valley fever, lumpy skin disease, bluetongue, sheep and goat pox, swine vesicular disease, contagious bovine pleuropneumonia, Newcastle disease and African horse sickness.

Crops are also at risk, the Defence Department says.

Potential bio-weapons include soybean rust, ear rot in corn, karnal bunt in wheat, ergot in sorghum, bacterial blight in rice, ring rot in potatoes, and wirrega blotch in barley.

The technology of manufacture and distribution has also been well tested.

In the First World War German agents in the US, Argentina, Romania, France and Mesopotamia targeted draft animals, cavalry horses and food animals with anthrax and glanders disease.

In the Second World War the Germans field-tested FMD on a Russian island and experimented with potato and turnip weevils, antler moths and potato stalk rot.

The French experimented with potato beetles and considered rinderpest as a weapon, Japan used aircraft in Manchuria to spread infected grains of wheat millet, contaminated cotton, anthrax and glanders, and the British made five million anthrax-laced cattle cakes able to be dropped from aircraft.

Until the programme was banned in 1969 the US developed warfare strains of wheat stem rust, rice blast fungus, rinderpest and FMD, producing about five tonnes of anti-plant agents to be used in a biological warfare doctrine developed by the Army and Air Force, including covert attacks on enemy crops.

More recently Sadam Hussein experimented with wheat stem rust and camel pox.

But the former Soviet Union had the largest and most innovative anti-agriculture programmes, experimenting with FMD, rinderpest, African swine fever, mutants of avian influenza and contagious ecthyma of sheep.

Researchers successfully used ticks to transmit FMD and poultry diseases, and insects to spread crop diseases such as wheat and barley mosaic streak virus, wheat fungal and brown leaf rust, and plagues against maize and barley.

That knowledge is now a biological time bomb.

The US Defence Department warns of crumbling security in former Soviet biological warfare facilities, and of widening discontent among their researchers. Numerous scientists and technicians previously involved in key programmes face severe salary reduction and unemployment, the department says.

States such as Iran, seeking to establish their own weapon capabilities, may try to exploit the situation by attempting to recruit such individuals.

Universities continue to pump out life-science graduates: more than 1300 biotechnology companies are now in business, with countries such as Iraq developing industries.

In what is regarded as a watermark for bioterrorism, Japan's Aum Shinrikyo not only produced and used sarin nerve gas, but attempted several unsuccessful biological attacks.

Usama Bin Laden, the world's most wanted terrorist, has publicly advocated the use of biological warfare and has tried to gain the pathogens for it.

In the US, Aryan Nation's white supremacist and microbiologist Larry Harris was narrowly prevented from fraudulently obtaining Yersinia pestis - the agent for bubonic plague.

And the range of agriculture's potential biological assailants extends beyond this, embracing, according to experts in terrorism, commodity producers and traders with access to scientists and pathogens who would gain enormous wealth through market manipulation by apparently natural crop or livestock disasters.

Organised crime could also be attracted. And individuals with their own barrows to push - such as New Zealand's rabbit calicivirus disease importers - remain a dangerous wild card.

Biological attack on farms is also relatively low risk for extremely high return. New Zealand's major exports would cease overnight if FMD was released, plunging the country into recession.

Soybean rust would cost America $US8 billion ($17.5 billion) a year, and FMD up to $US20 billion ($44 billion) over 15 years; FMD would push up Australia's inflation rate by 10 per cent, cost 85,000 jobs and cut economic growth by 3.5 per cent.

Major outbreaks could throw global commodity markets into chaos, and, some analysts warn, could impact on World Trade Organisation negotiations.

Consumer backlashes could deepen problems - already seen in Japan with the spread of BSE, and in Korea after FMD was reported in the nation's herds.

Nor does the threat have to be real for panic buttons to be pushed.

In Australia a prisoner with a grudge created havoc with a threat to release FMD.

In the US, letters alleging to contain anthrax were two years ago sent to health clinics in India, Kentucky and Tennessee, and threats were made to contaminate the ventilation systems of buildings in California with the disease.

All were hoaxes, but severely disrupted commerce and emergency services.

And beyond the hoaxes, the real time bomb keeps ticking.

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