Bioterrorism: Pathogens as Weapons

Abstract

Biowarfare has been used for centuries. The use of biological weapons in terrorism remains a threat. Biological weapons include infectious agents (pathogens) and toxins. The most devastating bioterrorism scenario would be the airborne dispersal of pathogens over a concentrated population area. Characteristics that make a specific pathogen a high-risk for bioterrorism include a low infective dose, ability to be aerosolized, high contagiousness, and survival in a variety of environmental conditions. The most dangerous potential bioterrorism agents include the microorganisms that produce anthrax, plague, tularemia, and smallpox. Other diseases of interest to bioterrorism include brucellosis, glanders, melioidosis, Q fever, and viral encephalitis. Food safety and water safety threats are another area of concern.

New effective chemically synthesized anti-smallpox compound NIOCH-14

“…Nowadays there exists the threat of smallpox emergence as a result of intentional or accidental spread of the pathogen from such potential sources as probably existing illegal depositaries (Henderson et al, 1999;Jahrling, Fritz & Hensley, 2005;Anderson & Bokor, 2012), the remains of people who died from smallpox found during archaeological excavations in permafrost soils where the virus can persist for a long time (Herrlich, 1960;Biagini et al, 2012;McCollum et al, 2014), or virus created artificially on the basis of data on its DNA primary structure (Parker et al, 2012). In addition, the magnitude and frequency of epidemic outbreaks of other orthopoxvirus infections such as monkeypox, cowpox and buffalopox have increased in the past decades (Baxby et al, 1994;Damaso et al, 2000;Wienecke et al, 2000;Reed et al, 2004;Favier et al, 2011).…”

Current Laboratory Biosecurity for Handling Pathogenic Viruses

“…VEE is considered to have the highest risk due to its lower infective dose. Other factors which make VEE attractive as a bioweapon are its potential to be spread through aerosol particles or weaponization through infected mosquitoes and its ease of production (Pappas et al, 2006;Anderson and Bokor, 2012). Other viruses, such as Caliciviruses, Hepatitis A, West Nile, LaCrosse encephalitis, California encephalitis, Japanese Encephalitis (JE) and St. Louis encephalitis are also rated as category B agents by the NIAID (2016).…”

Impact of Distinct Poxvirus Infections on the Specificities and Functionalities of CD4+T Cell Responses

“…ECTV is proving to be an excellent model both in terms of providing an opportunity to study a natural host-pathogen relationship under defined conditions and in being highly relevant to other poxviruses (112), including smallpox and monkeypox (11,12). The overall results of this study highlight interesting distinctions between the T CD4 ϩ epitope reactivity profiles of ECTV and VACV.…”

“…3A and C and Table 1). Eleven of these had been previously identified in the VACV screen, with two common epitopes (residues 46 to 60 of A18R [A18R 46 -60 ] and I1L [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] ) differing by a single, apparently neutral, amino acid (Table 2). Thus, three epitopes (I4L 632-646 , B13R 14 -28 , and E2L 426 -440 ) were novel (Table 3).…”

“…Smallpox, caused by the Variola virus poxvirus, plagued mankind for millennia and continues to be a concern due to the threat of weaponization (10)(11)(12)(13). Other poxviruses are equally lethal to their natural hosts, including ectromelia virus (ECTV), a poxvirus that causes smallpox-like symptoms in mice.…”