Australia unprepared for bioterrorism attack

Australia’s first university-based bioterrorism course will launch this month, tapping into expertise from UNSW, the Australian Army, NSW Police and international bioterrorism and disaster authorities.
It’s a frightening prospect: a deadly synthetic contagion is deliberately released at a major public event with the potential to inflict serious illness and death.
UNSW, the convenors of Australia’s first university-based bioterrorism course say despite the real possibility of a bioterrorist attack, the world remains ill-equipped to deal with the threat, because the approach to tackling the issue has remained largely unchanged since the Cold War.

The possibility that terrorists may have genetically engineered a hybrid of one of traditional pathogens cannot be discounted.

The UNSW Bioterrorism and Health Intelligence course will bring together experts from UNSW, Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Organisation, the Australian Army and the NSW Police later this month. They will be joined by international bioterrorism and disaster authorities from the United States, including the FBI, China, Malaysia and India.
The course will critically evaluate the bioterrorism threats to population health and highlight the new systems and approaches needed to mitigate that threat.
Professor MacIntyre says Australia's upgraded counter-terrorism laws have tended to focus on aspects such as foreign incursions and control orders, with less of a focus on bioterrorism, which is arguably just as important.
“Current legal frameworks mean it can take years to prosecute a rogue scientist doing unauthorised experiments, but smallpox or pandemic influenza can spread around the world in weeks. Our laws need to be revised to protect the public interest,” Professor MacIntyre says.
Course co-convenor, Dr David Muscatello, an expert in the spread of influenza, says the genetic engineering of pathogens is now a reality due to the rapid international acceleration of dual-use research of concern (DURC), which is research intended for good that may also be used to cause harm to humans.
Last year an international team of scientists generated an influenza virus with similar characteristics to the 1918 pandemic influenza virus. The death toll from the 1918 pandemic was an estimated 50 million people.
The polarising study, published in the Cell Host & Microbe journal, investigated the possibility of a pandemic influenza virus emerging from the pool of influenza viruses circulating in wild birds.
“Such research is not without risks. A US report released this month has highlighted the risk of laboratory accidents, with major incidents involving anthrax, Ebola, small pox and avian influenza occurring in the US in 2014,” Dr Muscatello says.
“The insider threat also poses major risks and will be covered in this new course.”
A recent US Pentagon investigation found its military laboratories sent live anthrax samples in the mail to other laboratories interstate and to Canada. The report noted that the irradiation of anthrax samples is meant to kill live anthrax spores before they are distributed, which didn’t occur on two occasions in the past 10 years.
Professor MacIntyre says despite the incidents posing no serious health threat to the public, they highlight some of the typical flaws in the international systems for dealing with biohazards.
Dan Wheelahan, University of NSW
This article was originally published on UNSW Newsroom. Read the original article.