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199  Our CBW Facilities Could Help Against Pestilences
     The Washington Post  March 7, 1970

     Chemical and radioactive pollution of the environment have so
captured the popular imagination that the most serious threats to 
human welfare are sometimes overlooked.  Throughout evolutionary 
history, infectious disease has been the overriding threat to the 
species.  In contemporary life, only warfare makes a competing claim.

     Antibiotics are often, but incorrectly, credited with a large
share of the advances against disease.  That credit belongs to 
environmental engineering.Procedures like the control of rats, fleas and
lice, suppression of mosquitoes by drainage (and, let it be admitted,
DDT), quarantine and the mechanical separation of drinking water from
sewerage channels have prevented far more illnesses than medicine
would know how to cure.

     Bacterial infections are truly far less threatening now that
antibiotics are available.  However, to refute the cliche of the 
"conquest" of plague, one need merely look up the statistics of bubonic 
plague in Southeast Asia, of gonorrhea among teenagers or of 
tuberculosis on Capitol Hill.

    Virus infections remain as a global time bomb against which we
have few defenses once it has erupted.  We are all well acquainted
with the periodic sweep of influenza across the earth as new strains
of viruses evolve.  This disease is not to be shrugged off, but a
minor change in the biology of the virus could give it access to the
brain and make it scourge without precedent.

     Every year or so, furthermore, we read of a new, exotic virus
that has broken out as a small epidemic.  Such incidents probably 
occur quite often in medically deprived communities where new diseases
may escape notice.  Last month, virologists at Yale University announced
that work on "Lassa fever" was too dangerous to continue at a 
university laboratory and required the special facilities of the 
National Communicable Disease Center of the Public Health Service at 
Atlanta.

     This caution responds to a terrible responsibility which goes 
beyond the risks of infection and death of more laboratory workers.
What would prevent the escape of such a virus to the general population?

     We now hear that further cases of a disease resembling Lassa
fever has been reported from Jos, another town in Nigeria almost 300
miles away.  If this is confirmed, we have to conclude that this virus
is widespread in Nigeria, and we can hardly afford not to study it to
forearm ourselves against its spread.  And we cannot blind ourselves
to the likelihood that a hundred similar viruses are being incubated
in animal population reservoirs, and are evolving anew with genetic
changes and hybridization of established viruses.

     Public health officials have been loath to dramatize this super-
ordinate threat.  It has, however, been ventilated by the policy    
studies on biological warfare that led to President Nixon's renunciation
of U.S. research on germ weapons.  As he implied, to use human 
intelligence for the intentional design of new diseases is so blatantly
suicidal that it cannot be justified by any fancied military advantage.

     However, the abandonment of secret development work merely stops
more mischief; we have still to establish an effective international
defense against the remaining threats of natural pestilence.  These
are seriously aggravated by the paradox of the coexistence of jet
transport, famine and squalor.
    
     Dr. P. Dorolle, deputy director general of the World Health 
Organization, is one of the few to have spoken out about the gaps in our
present response.  He refers, for example, to the threat that yellow
fever may penetrate into Asia, "where the virus would find ideal 
climatic conditions, an unvaccinated human population and its favorite
vector," the Aedes mosquito.

     In this circumstance, every single uncontrolled case of yellow
fever is a threat to hundreds of millions of people.  Much the same
could be said for many other diseases, which demands a level of 
international cooperation in surveillance and control that transcends 
political differences.

     The necessary control methods will remain uncertain and awkward 
until we learn much more about viruses, particularly about their 
biochemistry and genetics, for which the basic tools have recently been
perfected.  The United States could do a great deal to restore its
historic reputation as a defender of human liberties and health if it
reassigned our erstwhile biological warfare laboratories, as at Ft. 
Detrick, to make them an international research center for virological
peacefare.
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