Engineering Bio-Terror Agents: Lessons from the Offensive US and Russian Biological Weapons Programs

Engineering Bio-Terror Agents: Lessons from the Offensive US and Russian Biological Weapons Programs

This is a hearing before the Subcommittee on Prevention of Nuclear and Biological Attack to address the biological threat and to assess the role of the DHS in preventing bioterrorism in the US.

2005

While there is no formal consensus among the participants, there was general agreement that the threat of bioterrorism only increases as technological knowledge and expertise becomes exponentially more common. There are thousands around the world capable of producing genetically modified pathogens that pose a threat, and other countries do not keep their samples as well protected as the US. There was general consensus that the stockpiling of vaccines or therapeutics is not useful when genetic modification is so easy, and that funding should instead go towards flexible detection and agile response. A big part of agile response is research into nonspecific immunomodulators that could be useful against pathogens with antibiotic resistance.