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Sparks Fly Up
"Yet man is born into trouble, as sparks fly upward." Job
5:7
Imagine, if you will, a down-and-out Russian scientist…a germ
warfare expert…now a refugee from the dysfunctional Russian economy.
He is on the streets of Karachi carrying several small vials. He has
a date you see…a rendezvous with a swarthy man carrying a valise
filled with 100-dollar bills. Imagine that .
Lewis Simons wrote in the November issue of National Geographic about
a game played by the Federal Government in June 2001. It was called
“Dark Winter”. In this scenario, three men, dressed in maintenance
uniforms, entered a busy shopping mall one month before Christmas in
Oklahoma City. They were carrying plant sprayers—busily spritzing
plants and mingling with the holiday shoppers. Other teams of three
simultaneously did the same in malls in Philadelphia and Atlanta. The
Center For Disease Control announced the first confirmed case of smallpox
in Oklahoma City on December 9…followed by more confirmations
from Atlanta and Philadelphia. By December 15, the CDC had confirmed
2000 cases of smallpox in 15 states as well as in Canada, Mexico and
Great Britain. Emergency Rooms and other clinical facilities were overwhelmed.
There was widespread rioting…and the military was deployed on
the streets of many U.S. cities. CDC officials, meanwhile, projected
that there would be 3 million cases by February…1 million Americans
would be dead with no end in sight…
GAME OVER
The Bush administration has decided to
vaccinate 10 million Health care workers…plus cops and firefighters
for smallpox…according to computer models this in itself will
result in 25 to 30 deaths from the vaccine. It will also drain the budgets
of county health departments who will bear the brunt of administering
these vaccines. The current allocation of 970 million dollars for county
health will be gone…which means that other programs like cancer
screening and children’s dental go immediately to the back burner.
I don’t think that any of us who were around when the World Health
Organization announced that smallpox was eradicated from the planet…perhaps
the greatest scientific achievement of the 20th century…had in
our worst nightmares dreamed that this horror would come back to haunt
us in this particular way.
There is no treatment and no cure for smallpox…and it is a sure
thing that 30 % of those exposed to it will die from it. If you get
vaccinated within 48 hours of exposure you have a chance…otherwise…well….
Ditto for anthrax…remember anthrax??…there is a vaccine
and it can be as lethal as the one for smallpox…inhalation anthrax
is not contagious, but it is almost always fatal…funny…those
words keep cropping up as I researched this piece….lethal…fatal…maybe
this is a topic that should not be discussed in polite conversation…like
masturbation or bowel movements…maybe what we don’t know
won’t hurt us…then again…
Christopher Pala, in a recent New York Times Magazine, wrote about Vozrozhdenie…a
remote island in the south Aral Sea (he dubbed it Anthrax Island). It
was abandoned by the Soviets in 1992, and it is now owned by Kazakhstan…for
many years, the Soviet Union used this island as a testing site for
their biological weapons program. There were 8 to 10 warehouses, a housing
complex that accommodated as many as 15,000 people in its salad days,
and a 3 story lab…the “hot spot’ where most of the
pathogens were stored.
Mr. Pala interviewed Gennadi Lypushkin, physician, microbiologist, and
former Red Army colonel who supervised the installation on Vozrozhdenie.
He had a lot to say…especially about the teams of scavengers who
have removed about 200 tons of stuff from this hell-on-earth (“they
are risking their lives and the lives of thousands of others every day”).
Apparently the Soviet army buried large store of germs before they abandoned
the island (and their bio-weapon testing program)…stuff like anthrax,
botulinum, antibiotic-resistant plague…and smallpox. A team of
Kazakh and U.S. scientists torched the buildings on Anthrax Island…but
according to Mr. Pala’s piece, a whole host of test tubes, petri
dishes and other lab glassware survived the heat…not to mention
what was underground.
Dr. Lepyoshkin made another salient point about bio-weapons in this
interview…to have an ‘effect’ on one square kilometer…and
here ‘effect’ means killing ½ of the population…it
costs $2000 with conventional weapons, $800 with nuclear weapons, $600
with chemical weapons, and one dollar with a bio-weapon.” One
dollar…the good Dr. Death also said that he had ‘no qualms’
about his work…that, like nukes, nobody…nobody…would
be crazy enough to use biological weapons. Of course, he added, that
was before lunatics started crashing airplanes into buildings…terrorism
changed everything.
You bet…Pandora’s box is already open…the genie is
out of the bottle…and it is way too late to lock the barn door
because the mare split a long time ago. There are many people in the
world…drunk with rage…desperate…left out…who
may or may not have access to germs…we already know that there
is plenty of this stuff out there…it is cheap and can be assembled
in the back of a truck…what do we do if postal workers or TV journalists
or politicians start dropping out with anthrax, botulinum or smallpox??
Do I get smallpox.vaccine for my kids if push comes to shove? What if
they are the 1 or 2 per million to buy it? How do we as residents of
a sedate nondescript midwestern city behave???
Do the Iraqis have biologicals?? Israeli intelligence (according to
a recent Washington Post article) says they do, and they are stashing
them plus chemical weapons in Syria. Do we reduce Baghdad to a smoking
ash pit?? China, Russia, Iran and North Korea have them…probably
Egypt, Libya, Sudan and Israel have bio-weapons programs up and running…should
we put them on our hit list as well?? Should we, as the old Randy Newman
song suggests, “..drop the big one, to see what happens”??
Sparks fly up…a phrase from the book of Job and a mantra for the
late Ken Kesey and his band of pranksters…but it is hard to make
sparks when you never know who will show up at half-time at the super
bowl with a nasal spray…or who will put a small vial on the BART
tracks in San Francisco. This is a conundrum for right-thinking people…do
we continue to ignore it as we certainly have done in the past or do
we outfit ourselves with hazmat suits and gas masks like some of our
kin in the 1950s who built nuclear fallout shelters?? As I edit this,
I notice that there are way too many question marks…does that
tell you anything? At this point, I am operating somewhere between a
controlled state of raging paranoia and making whoopee…during
the iciest days of the cold war…we were comforted by the civility
of the superpowers…nobody was going to push the nuclear button
because everybody knew that it meant mutual destruction…everybody
dies...and nobody wanted that. Now…you throw a suicidal maniac
factor into the equation…well, I am not so comforted as I was
in days gone by. Will it be, as T. S. Eliot suggests…”not
with a bang but a whimper…”
Sparks fly up.
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