The New York Times OP-ED

Saturday, October 16, 1999

IS THAT AN EPIDEMIC - OR A TERRORIST ATTACK?

A Lethal Weapon We Must Learn to Recognize

By Jessica Stern

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. The flurry of rumors last week about the origins of the encephalitis outbreak in the New York metropolitan area proved how anxious we are about biological terrorism.

After an article in The New Yorker quoted unnamed Central Intelligence Agency sources who speculated that the West Nile-like virus might have been spread in an Iraqi biological attack, the C.I.A. found itself having to reassure the public that this chain of events was highly

unlikely.

And indeed, it is. For one thing, West Nile encephalitis is a relatively mild disease, and Saddam Hussein has far more virulent agents in his arsenal. For another, the outbreak has all the earmarks of a naturally occurring infectious disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

But this case illustrates one of the most troubling aspects of biological terrorism: it can be extremely difficult to distinguish germ warfare from a natural outbreak of disease.

After all, this is not the first time that biological attacks have been blamed for sudden epidemics. In 1997, when foot-and-mouth disease struck pigs in Taiwan for the first time in 83 years, the Taiwanese Government was forced to slaughter some four million hogs. Taiwanese

farmers, without any evidence, suspected that China had deliberately introduced the disease on the island

to damage the economy.

After Cuba suffered an epidemic of dengue fever in 1981, it accused the United States of biological aggression. In 1997 Cuba made a similar claim, charging that the United

States had dropped crop-eating pests from a low4lying plane.

On the rare occasions when biological weapons have been used or accidentally released, scientists and government officials often first assumed that the epidemics were natural outbreaks.

For instance, many American security experts initially believed that a 1979 outbreak of anthrax in the Soviet Union was caused by contaminated meat, as the Kremlin had claimed. At least 66 people died. But in 1992, after Communism collapsed and Boris Yeltsin became President of Russia, he admitted that the anthrax came from an illegal biological weapons plant.

And when 751 people in Oregon became infected with salmonella 1984, public health authorities suspected a natural outbreak not bid logical terrorism. A year later a criminal investigation discovered that the salmonella had been deliberately spread by the Rajneeshee cult.

The best way to pinpoint the origin of an epidemic - and to determine whether it was deliberately set in motion by terrorists - is to improve disease surveillance and laboratory analysis.

Doctors must be better trained about what diseases they need to report to public health authorities, and compliance must be more strictly enforced. Secure Internet links should be established among doctors, health departments and the C.D.C.

And because many new diseases in humans originate from animals, we also need better systems of communication between health officials and veterinarians.

We may never know for certain how a West Nile-like virus suddenly appeared in New York City. But we do know this: The United States and other governments still have far to

go before they are prepared to deal with outbreaks of exotic diseases whether they are spread by nature,

or - as is far less likely - deliberately by man.