Thus, there will be more institutions and individuals whom terrorist organizations could exploit for their own malicious purposes, he believes. World Health Organization data shows that there has been a marked rise in the number of natural outbreaks of emerging infectious disease around the world in just the last decade. Factors such as changing demographics, urbanization, and closer human-animal contact are likely the cause of this abrupt appearance of more infectious disease.
“Highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) is a good example,” said Salerno, scanning through maps on his computer screen that show the epidemic spreading across Asia and Europe. “This is a disease that did not exist 10 years ago and now it’s endemic in almost half of the world,” he said. Public health organizations are investing in infrastructure to address infectious disease outbreaks and this, in turn, could create opportunities for abuse. “This is a double-edged sword. While public health will surely benefit from more infectious disease work internationally, the risk that someone may misuse biology will also increase.”
Following the anthrax attacks of 2001, the U.S. government dramatically increased spending to respond to this threat — $36 billion since 2001. Primarily, these new U.S. programs have focused on enhancing the nation’s ability to respond to a bioterrorist attack. While many Sandia programs, including MicroChemLab and other devices, are actively involved in bolstering the U.S. response posture, the Labs more recently became involved in a preventive effort as well.
Sandia’s International Biological Threat Reduction (IBTR) program advances U.S. threat reduction and counterterrorism goals by working to develop and implement systems and practices that promote the safe, secure, and responsible use and management of high-risk biological agents across the globe. Because almost all of biology is potentially dual use — for improving public health or attacking it — Sandia’s experts are equally concerned with naturally occurring, highly infectious disease and those that are maliciously introduced, Salerno explained.