Worrying about wrong threat weakens U.S. bioterrorism preparedness
new ways of countering them — not one at a time but all of them,” Orent writes.
After the anthrax letter attacks of fall 2001 the biodefense establishment’s immediate response was to focus on the greatest and likeliest of bioterror threats — anthrax, smallpox, and plague. In 2004 billions of dollars were set aside for Project Bioshield, which was jointly run by DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The program aimed to produce new, safer vaccines and treatments for anthrax and smallpox, in particular. Almost four years later, though, Project Bioshield has little to show for all the billions of dollars invested in it. “The old ‘one-bug-one-drug’ strategy — designed to develop vaccines and therapies for anthrax, smallpox and plague separately — has been abandoned in favor of ‘broad spectrum technology’ — drugs and methods that will, at least in theory, kill many types of germs,” Orent says. Rutgers microbiologist Richard Ebright believes that this broader approach is better. As the effectiveness of the antibiotics we already have wanes, it makes sense to search for new classes of these drugs, he believes. The same goes for antivirals. Very few effective ones exist, and viral strains can develop resistance to them too, as some influenza strains have already done with Tamiflu, the newest licensed drug for treating the flu.
New antibiotics and antivirals represent only a small part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ current biodefense program, according to Ebright. The institute is assigning higher priority to radical new approaches. Chief among them is the modulation, or enhancement, of “innate immunity”: There are two components to human immunity: innate, or general, immunity and acquired, or specific, immunity. Innate immunity involves killer cells and chemicals the body launches to fight invading germs. While the germs are held at bay, the body develops specific antibodies to mop up the infection. In theory, enhancing innate immunity means creating ways to intensify or strengthen these immune responses so the body can fend off all infections, whether newly evolved or artificial, as soon as they appear. This sounds good. “If you could treat any new disease before the germ is even identified, then artificial bioweapons, or such naturally emerging germs as SARS, would cease to be terrorist specters,” Orent writes. In life, however, things are never that simple. Innate immunity is an exquisitely fine-tuned system, honed by millions of years of
