Bioterror and Biowarfare - A Beginner's Guide (Beginner's Guides) Paperback – 1 March 2006

Good Book,I liked the fact it is a beginners guide.Good first book.

In June of 1763, British troops, weary of the war with the Ottawa Indians, decided to meet with them on June 24 and give them a gift: blankets and a handkerchief taken from their hospital, which at the time housed patients stricken with smallpox. There was an outbreak of smallpox among the Indians around this time, but the author of this book reminds the reader, it is not clear whether it was because of the gift of blankets. Caution must govern the analysis of history he says, and this is especially true when detailing the historical record of bioterrorism. Hysteria and political hype surround the subject of biological warfare and bioterrorism, and so books that address the subject intelligently are sorely needed. In spite of its short length, this book is one of these. It's only minus might be the omission of the technical details behind bioweapons, but it makes up for this lack by its sound articulation of the issues.So which groups or nations have engaged in bioterrorism in say the last hundred years? The author gives a fairly long list. Some examples are:-Germany in World War I used, via its spies, biological agents (anthrax and glanders) to infect horses in the United States that were due to be shipped to the Allied governments. Germany conducted similar operations in Romania, Norway, and Argentina.-Japan engaged in biowarfare from 1931 to 1945, mostly against China, using agents such as anthrax, glanders, typhoid, cholera, dysentery, and plague. The leader of the Japanese bioweapons projects was Ishii Shiro, who according to the author was pardoned by the United States government in exchange for his laboratory notebooks.All of the major Allied powers aggressively conducted bioweapons research during and after World War II, and some of this research is discussed in the book. The United States government in particular was able to develop crystalline forms of bacterial toxin and had concentrated efforts to understand and control certain plant diseases. These research programs were finally shut by President Richard Nixon in 1969. Interestingly, and surprisingly, the author reports that some Seventh-Day Adventists were willing to submit themselves as test subjects during some of this research.Readers will naturally be curious as to whether Iraq did indeed have a biological weapons program. The author reports that it did, beginning in 1985 with its war with Iran, and concentrating its efforts on anthrax and botulinum toxin. He concludes that Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, entered the war in 1991 with usable biological weapons.But it was the Soviet Union that had the largest and most deadly bioweapons program of all the countries actively involved in this type of research. The author gives a detailed overview of this huge research effort, some of it apparently using techniques from genetic engineering, such as combining two different viruses into a chimera virus. The creation of chimera viruses is a very common technique in viral genetic engineering, and certainly will be, and should be, continued in the future. The Soviet effort is alarming, but its accomplishments in genetic engineering need to be repeated in order to find out just what is possible in the creation of bioweapons.The author also addresses what the future holds for bioweapons development, various hypothetical attack scenarios, and what can be done to counter them. Several experts in biotechnology have remarked on the relative ease with which future weapons can be developed. But if this is true, effective countermeasures can just as easily be developed. For every genetically engineered deadly virus created in a laboratory there can be one created to counter it. The scenario of garage-created bioweapons is thus real but so also are garage-created antidotes. Genetic engineering in the next decades will become just as easy as ordinary cooking. This is a fact that can cause anxiety as much as elation, the latter arising if cognizance is taken of the enormous benefits of genetic engineering. Genetic engineers in this regard should go full-steam ahead and not hold back, not for a second.