Garrocho SC

Language: Spanish
References: 2
Page: 97-108
PDF size: 153.60 Kb.

ABSTRACT

Since there is no way to avoid microbes to harm either the attacked troops or the attacking ones, they can be only used as strategical weapons. This means that, when it is pertinent, these weapons are going to be employed against the civic population. Throughout the course of warlike confrontations, the parts in conflict have tried to resort to pathogenic germs with diverse success. It was not until pathology had a considerable development when people could count on the scientific and technical resources to design procedures of research, genetic alterations, production, storage, and practical application of microorganisms to be used in wartime. In spite of the fact that the most powerful countries are the ones which have implemented, financed and covered up ambitious programs to achieve a huge arsenal of biological weapons, nowadays it is accepted that every almost country in the Third World may become a military force in this field. Among the great number of harmful microbe species for the human being, fewer than a dozen of them are considered at present to be possible to be employed for warlike uses: anthrax, botulism, cholera, glanders, plague, Q fever, tularemia or rabbit fever, and smallpox. However, none of these microorganisms may be found in the laboratories of the biological forces in their original form, they have become militarized: at present, they present a great resistance to extreme temperatures, desiccation, the expansive power of explosions, antibiotics, and vaccines. Their incubation period has become shorter, their infection ability greater, and their death power has been increased enormously. New sophisticated techniques have been developed in order to preserve, store and transport them. Nowadays, through research on animals and human beings, there is already a precise knowledge about how to launch them in order to cause greater mortality or disability on inhabitants of enemy territories: the optimal size of the bombs, the height they should explode over the cities, the minimum desirable weight to allow the small aerosol drops or the very light infecting dust particles to keep floating in the air during a longer time, their different effectiveness on crowds being in open air or closed spaces, the ability of a suicide attacker to spread the disease. Nevertheless, when facing at these facts, not even the most powerful country in the world has been able to develop a strategy that may allow it to protect its own inhabitants in an effective way. On the other hand, this situation oblige our schools in biomedical sciences to form professionals who are reasonably able to face situations of biological emergence whose risk may be considered more and more immediate when talking about our proximity with the greatest target of international bioterrorism.

REFERENCES

1. Alibek K. Biohazard. Broadway: Randon House, 1999.

2. Miller J, Engelberg S, Broad W. Germs. NY: Simon and Schuster, 2001. J. Amer Med Assoc, aug 1997.