Salmonella scare evokes bioterrorism fears

Clint Van Zandt • Profile • E-mail

I was in Manila investigating a kidnapping and although as an FBI agent, I was always on the alert for trouble — especially when I traveled in problem areas around the world — I never saw “the silent assassin” when it attacked me.  Salmonella, a bacteria that finds its origin in animal feces, had hidden somewhere in the food I ate there and began its attack on me the following morning. All the symptoms were there: the severe cramps and fever that eventually left me doubled up on the floor. Due to dehydration, I soon found myself in a local hospital with IVs in my arms and legs. “We could have lost you,” the local doctor said.

Although we normally think of nuclear weapons when we hear the term “weapons of mass destruction,” when attacked by salmonella, I felt as if I had been hit by a bomb. The “weaponizing” of an invisible potential assassin like salmonella has not escaped the eyes and ears of terrorists. Many may recall the 1984 Rajneeshee bioterrorist attack when a group called Osho, led by a man calling himself the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, tried to sway a local Oregon county circuit court election by contaminating the salad bars in most local restaurants with salmonella. This act allowed Rajneesh’s followers, who ate at home, to be the only local residents well enough to show up and vote. About 751 local residents contracted salmonellosis and almost 50 went to the hospital. Although no deaths were associated with this act of bioterrorism, it proved to anyone watching the ease at which a bioterrorist attack can be mounted.

Shortly after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, America sustained a second wave of attacks, this by a suspected domestic terrorist using anthrax as his bioterrorism weapon of choice. The biological attack would come in two phases, with deadly anthrax spores sent in envelopes postmarked 9/18/01 from Trenton, N.J., although authorities believe the letters were mailed from Princeton. A second set of similar letters were mailed some three weeks after the first deadly letters.  Five people were killed and 17 others were infected by the deadly spores. Investigators believe the killer letters contained at least two different grades of anthrax, and while some believed that the anthrax had been “weaponized” in a national lab, the FBI would later suggest that the anthrax could have been milled in a makeshift home laboratory. Dozens of suspects were interviewed, both foreign and domestic, but no one has been charged, much less convicted of this attack.

Many believe that a bioterrorist attack on U.S. agricultural targets is reasonable and probable.  Biologics are cheap, easy weapons to obtain and deploy. They are both hard to detect and easy to transport without detection. One of the many challenges of bioterrorism is that biological agents such as anthrax, smallpox and the plague, long believed to no longer be a significant threat (the last recorded incident of smallpox was in the late 1970s), can easily be developed and deployed and it would be hard to determine whether the incident was an accident or an attack. How to protect a large population group is the ongoing challenge to governments that might need to protect its citizens from such an attack, one that, potentially, could kill tens of thousands and render that country’s military forces incapable of defending itself. Al-Qaida and other terrorist groups are believed to have seriously explored the use of these horrible weapons.

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