We're all gonna die!

Abstract

Mediawatch: Richard Harris reports on the journalists quickly raising fears of terrorism by biological weapons in the wake of the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11.What's a poor biomedical reporter to do when entire television networks and newspapers turn their undivided attention to suicidal terrorist pilots? Forget the scientific journals. Those stories won't run. Try another stem-cell story? Not unless it's a terrorist cell. No, the solution is to scare the living daylights out of everybody.It's called following the news. And what better way than to ponder even more horrible things that haven't happened to people but which could. The Washington Post got out in front of this story bright and early, while the frantic search for bodies at the smoldering World Trade Center was still under way.“It would require just a small private plane, not a hijacked commercial jetliner. A helper could casually dump a bag of powdery bacterial spores while in flight, rather than having to overpower a planeload of passengers. And the team could land and be home in time for dinner instead of ending it all in a suicidal inferno,” The Post reported. “Anyone with a cough would be a weapon,” Michael Olsterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, told the paper. But this story ran before there was even a hint of such of a possibility — before we learned that Mohamed Atta had wandered around Florida, asking questions about crop-dusters. And the Post was by no means alone.Dean Wilkening at Stanford told the San Francisco Chronicle that bin Laden could buy a germ warfare weapon from a rogue state like Iraq or disaffected Russian scientists. “It might be a very small weapon, unlikely to cause a million casualties,” Wilkening said, “but 10 000 to 50 000 is more realistic.”Newsday, on New York's Long Island also rang alarm bells. “No one is in charge. They don't have anybody expert in biosciences and public health, as far as the eye can see in this administration,” Tara O'Toole, deputy director of the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins — and a former Clinton Administration official — told the paper.Some readers were not very happy with this descent into fear. Readers complained to the Washington Post that the information was too specific. For example, the Post reported advice from a crop-dusting service about the best nozzle to use with bacteriological weapons. “I was surprised [another] article didn't also include contact information for research and pathology laboratories known to produce such spores,” one letter writer complained sarcastically.Coverage — and anxiety — ratcheted up as the crop-duster story unfolded, and when one newspaper employee in Florida died of inhalation anthrax and sporadic exposures were reported in that office and elsewhere in the US. At this writing, it's not clear whether these are related to terrorism.Curiously, writers who don't specialize in biomedicine often had a much less frightening view of an attack with biological weapons. A close look at the news sources explains this difference. Naturally, science writers often relied heavily on people from the world of public health. The story from their perspective is that the system is not prepared to handle an attack. Indeed, they've been pleading for more money for years. Scholars who study the history of bioterrorism, on the other hand, see a string of failures and difficulties.The New York Times reassured its readers with this: “Experts say that biological weapons, with few exceptions, are hard to make and use. In the early 1990s, Aum Shinriko, a Japanese cult, launched germ attacks in and around Tokyo that were meant to kill millions. The strikes produced no known injuries or deaths,” Jonathan Tucker, a germ-weapons expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies told the Times, “there are greater risks of dying on the highway than from exposure to anthrax”.The Financial Times was similarly reassuring. “Biological weapons have an apocalyptic reputation. But they are often ineffective in spreading disease,” ran one headline. In that opinion piece, Henry Miller at the Hoover Institution wrote that anthrax doesn't spread well from person to person and highly infectious epidemics are generally self limiting.Ultimately, journalists covering this story face the same problem as everybody else does. As the Los Angeles Times put it, “A bioweapons attack using an agent like smallpox is almost impossible to imagine. As we now know, that's no reason to dismiss it.”