Insects - Bioterrorism Threat On Six Legs

October 21, 2007

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Albert Eistein once stated, “ I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” With all the devastation that a dirty bomb or suitcase nuke would bring, it perhaps does not compare to the potentially wide-spread, catastrophic damage of a bio-terror attack.

The Boston Globe covers the frightening aspects of such attack.

One of the cheapest and most destructive weapons available to terrorists today is also one of the most widely ignored: insects. These biological warfare agents are easy to sneak across borders, reproduce quickly, spread disease, and devastate crops in an indefatigable march. Our stores of grain could be ravaged by the khapra beetle, cotton and soybean fields decimated by the Egyptian cottonworm, citrus and cotton crops stripped by the false codling moth, and vegetable fields pummeled by the cabbage moth. The costs could easily escalate into the billions of dollars, and the resulting disruption of our food supply - and our sense of well-being - could be devastating. Yet the government focuses on shoe bombs and anthrax while virtually ignoring insect insurgents.

Indeed, a great strategic lesson of 9/11 has been overlooked. Terrorists need only a little ingenuity, not sophisticated weapons, to cause enormous damage. Armed only with box cutters, terrorists hijacked planes and brought down the towers of the World Trade Center. Insects are the box cutters of biological warfare - cheap, simple, and wickedly effective.

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Jeffrey A. Lockwood has more…

Microscopic agents such as smallpox, ebola, and anthrax have become synonymous with bioterrorism. But insects can be more practical and effective.

Producing sufficient quantities of viruses or bacteria can be technically challenging, the process is extremely hazardous, and it is difficult to find a way to disperse the product effectively. Getting particles of the right size to stay aloft as an aerosol is not simple, and if the winds shift an otherwise effective attack is neutralized.

Anthrax, for example, is easy to isolate and can be milled into a light powder, but it doesn’t replicate quickly and it doesn’t pass readily between people.

Insects, on the other hand, often can be gathered in sufficient numbers to seed an outbreak. Their eggs are environmentally robust and small enough to carry by the thousands without risk of detection. A single Medfly female in a survey trap is enough to immediately shut down an agricultural exporter, and finding two flies within a 1-mile radius triggers an eradication program.

A decent representative of the technological level of today’s terrorist is the Japanese biological warfare program in World War II. After seven years of work with microbes, the only people killed in the first attack with bacterial weapons were 40 Japanese who launched the assault and became accidentally infected with typhoid. So the Japanese turned to insect-borne diseases. A year later they killed 50,000 of their enemy in the first attack with plague-infected fleas.

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