What can we do to prevent outbreaks of infectious diseases from becoming epidemics or pandemic? In this course, you’ll learn the facts about infectious diseases and medical responses. We'll focus on the public health laws and policies that provide the framework for effective prevention, like quarantine laws, drug development policies, and bioterrorism and biodefense.
Hot Topics for Advanced Instruction: Week 2 Video 7: Biosecurity and Bioterrorism
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En provenance du cours de University of Pittsburgh
Epidemics, Pandemics and Outbreaks
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Week 2: Understanding Infectious Diseases
Welcome to Week Two! This week’s lesson provides you with the tools needed to understand the world of infectious disease. It will allow you to develop a context of knowledge and familiarity with the concepts that inform legal and public health response strategies to outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics. What you learn here will be drawn upon in weeks 3-4: “Global Health Security” and “Local Countermeasures.”
Rencontrer les enseignants
Elena A. BaylisAssociate Professor
Law
Elizabeth Ferrell Bjerke, JDDirector, JD/MPH Program
Health Policy and Management
Amesh A. Adalja, MD, FACPSenior Associate
UPMC Center for Health Security
Ryan MorhardGuest Instructor
[MUSIC]
In this lecture, I'm going to talk about more of an advanced topic,
drawing on what I've told you about other infectious diseases and integrating well
with some of the other topics that the other instructors are going to talk about.
We're going to talk about bioterrorism and biosecurity.
So what is bioterrorism?
It's really the intentional use of a biological agent to inflict
disease and harm.
And, what they do are construct bio weapons.
This is something that's not just a modern thing,
not something that happened in the 2000s.
This is something that has a very, very long history, that stretches back to
the BC era when we saw people poisoning wells with deadly fungus.
Where people are putting snakes in pots and throwing them onto ship decks, or
people were poison-tipping their spears in order to inflict more harm.
So this is something that's been with the human race just as long almost as
conventional warfare.
In the Medieval era, people like Vlad the Impaler, who you may know as
the historical inspiration of Dracula, would poison enemy wells.
One of the very famous examples of bioterrorism and
one of the lessons about what you don't want to happen is when the Mongols
were invading a city in the Crimea and they catapulted dead soldiers who had died
of the plague over the wall into the city they wanted to attack.
And what ended up happening was plague took hold in that city, but
some of those people then ran and they started the Black Death.
Which killed millions and millions of people over Europe and
reshaped all of Europe.
And that's one of the caveats of bioterrorism.
it's very hard to control.
In modern era, right here in Pittsburgh,
the British used smallpox-tainted blankets with the Indians during the French and
Indian War because they knew that that would cause disease in the Indians.
And that was interesting because it was instrumental in George Washington,
who was a soldier in the French Indian war.
He knew that the British were capable of doing this.
So what he did was have
the revolutionary army delay attacks because of the fear of smallpox.
And he actually had people variolated.
And we talked about that in the small pox lecture, about this was before
vaccination, a way of protecting by giving people a small dose of smallpox.
George Washington did that because he was so
afraid of bioweapons being used by the British.
During the Civil War,
the Confederates also tried to spread smallpox among the Union troops.
World War II, there was an infamous unit in Japan called Unit 731,
which experimented on Chinese prisoners.
Using a whole host of organisms like plague and
killed thousands of people in the process of learning about biological warfare.
The most famous biological warfare program is that of the former Soviet Union,
which continued for decades in defiance of the Biological Weapons Convention,
which you may hear about in some of your other lectures.
This was a treaty that ban the use of biological weapons.
Yet the Soviets violated it all the way through.
The only way that we really figured this out was when people defected and
said that they were actually doing biological weapons.
They tried to weaponize things like Ebola, anthrax, botulism, had a whole enterprise.
Iraq also tried to do bioweapons.
There are very famous individuals from Iraq during the first Gulf War and
also into the operation Iraqi Freedom that you may have heard about called Dr. Germ,
Chemical Ali, Chemical Sally, all were part of the Iraqi bioweapons group that
was brewing leaders and leaders of anthrax botulism and other diseases.
The US even had an offensive bioweapons program started by George Merck,
also the founder of Merck Pharmaceuticals.
It was started during the FDR administration, centered in Fort Detrick,
Maryland, in Frederick, Maryland.
And that is where offensive biological weapons research occurred
in the United States.
That all continued until the Nixon administration when
President Nixon stopped offensive biological weapons research.
And now that area is called USAMRIID, United States Army Research Institute for
Infectious Diseases, where defensive bio-defense work occurs.
The thing that really sets people thinking about biological terrorism is the anthrax
attacks which occurred in the months after the September 11 attacks.
And what happened there were 22 people were infected with anthrax through the US
postal service, through letters that had anthrax spores in them.
Five people died and it really set an entire framework of the United States
government in place in order to respond to this biological weapon attack.
Even though 22 people doesn't seem like a lot, it really got the government moving.
This wasn't the first time though that biological weapons were used.
There was an incident in 1984, in Oregon, where a religious cult wanted to influence
a local election so what they did was they bought salmonella from a catalog and
went and tainted local salad bars with salmonella, getting people sick with
salmonella poisoning, trying to influence voter turnout.
Nobody died.
The CDC went and investigated this outbreak, but they thought it was natural.
That's another important point about bioterrorism.
It's very hard to distinguish a natural outbreak from an unnatural outbreak.
It was only after some of the cult members started to confess that
the government realized that this was a biological attack.
So what are some of the response frameworks that we have?
So this is a whole government response.
The Department of Defense does things like bio-surveillance,
looking at disease patterns all across the world.
They think about troop protection, vaccinating troops against things like
anthrax and smallpox in case they are used as biological weapons.
They have a major interest in vaccine and
countermeasure development, that we saw used in the 2013-2014 Ebola outbreak.
Things like vaccines against Ebola, vaccines against smallpox,
vaccines against anthrax.
And they do fund a lot of the development of these.
In the Department of Health and Human Services there's a whole division which
you will hear about called the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response.
Which manages the government and the government's response to these agents,
either if they're intentional biological agents or pandemics that occur naturally.
And there they have programs such as something called BARDA,
which helps develop these drugs and
vaccines that nobody really has a market for unless there's a biological attack.
The FDA has a division that deals with counter-terrorism that allows us to
push these drugs out faster, which you'll hear more about in later lectures.
Something called their Emergency Use Authorization Authority where they can
have a drug that's not FDA approved be used in a national emergency.
The CDC has a whole division of public health emergency preparedness
that works on issues related to bioterrorism.
And the Department of Homeland Security formed in the wake of September 11,
performs what are called Material Threat Analysis.
They look at the landscape of infectious diseases and
think about which ones could be used as a biological weapon.
And then they developed plans based upon them.
They also have things call BioWatch detectors which are in certain
selected cities in United States where they're sampling the air, looking for
these pathogens, the presence of certain pathogens there.
So going back to why is bioterrorism a problem,
remember these are deadly diseases that cause a lot of fear and a lot of
psychological distress among a population, much more so than a nuclear weapon.
And they're much cheaper than a nuclear weapon and they're much harder to detect.
We don't have radiation scanners the way we do for nuclear weapons for
biological weapons.
There's a lot of dual use.
People work in microbiology labs all over the place.
In Iraq, we people like Dr.
Germ, who was a microbiologist who was also able to make biological weapons.
So this is something that's not very hard to do, if you have the right personnel.
There are some drawbacks and
we talked about this with the Black Death, that it is very hard to control.
If you have an outbreak, you can infect your own troops or
your own people because things spread.
These aren't like a nuclear weapon where just a certain area is destroyed and
you can go into that area.
You may have residual anthrax spores, for example.
You have to consider what's going to happen?
What are the implications of using a biological weapon for your own troops?
We do have the Biological Weapons Convention, which I mentioned before, and
the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Both cover this type of warfare and both are signed by multiple nations.
However, as I said earlier,
the Soviet Union violated the Biological Weapons Convention.
So the strength of it is always something that's been questioned.
So I hope this gives you a general overview of a topic of bioterrorism and
biosecurity.
You'll learn more about some of these programs in other lectures.
[MUSIC]
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