Bioterrorism in U.S. not likely, expert says

Col. Ted Cieslak

2:32 p.m., Dec. 2, 2004--The risk of a devastating bioterrorism attack on U.S. soil has been exaggerated, Col. Ted Cieslak, a bioterrorism expert and doctor who recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq, said at the University of Delaware.

Cieslak, who delivered a lecture on “Biowarfare and Bioterrorism: A Primer” Tuesday, Nov. 30, said too much money was being spent on unnecessary measures against possible bioterrorism.

“I don’t want people to think it’s more of a threat than it is, and I think billions and billions of dollars have been wasted already in this country, wasted on biodefense that wasn’t necessary,” Cieslak said after the lecture. “I think it is a threat, something we need to know about, prepare against, but also it’s very easy to go overboard.

“Right now, other forms of terrorism are still bigger threats. If you look at threats you can draw a graph: You can have a high-consequence, low-risk, and the low-consequence, high risk. Biological threats are low risk. It’s unlikely that any of this is going to happen in the next 10 years and kill a million people,” he said.

Cieslak, the chief of the department of pediatrics at the San Antonio Military Pediatric Center, gave a brief history of biological warfare, dating back to the plague at Kaffa in the 14th Century, the establishment of the U.S. program in 1953, its end in 1969 and the mysterious Ricin poisoning incidents in London and Virginia. He explained that the U.S. destroyed all its biological weapons and the existing material that is used only for defensive research measures cannot be used offensively under any circumstances.

Biological weapons, Cieslak said, are considered a big risk because they are easy to find, inexpensive to produce and can disseminate at great distance, often in invisible clouds that are hard to detect until the illness begins to show in victims. The potential effects of such an attack include overwhelming medical facilities and panic long after the attackers have fled.

Among the biological weapons that were accumulated by the former Soviet Union and listed as likely to be used were smallpox, plague, anthrax, botulism, influenza and typhus.

“Anthrax and smallpox are viable large-scale threats,” Cieslak said. “We need some national plan as to how we would deal with those, if they ever occur, but I don’t think we need to jump off the deep end [and] invest in every hare-brained scheme.”

Cieslak served as a practicing pediatrician for five years before entering a fellowship in pediatric infectious diseases at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. During his fellowship, Cieslak did research in the field of pathogenesis. After a tour as the infectious disease consultant at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, Cieslak was appointed chief of field operations and then chief of the operational medicine division at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md. He joined the San Antonio Military Pediatric Center in 2001.

Cieslak remains active in biowarfare and bioterrorism defense and serves as consultant to the U.S. Surgeon General. He has lectured widely on biodefense and disaster response and has worked with the Department of Defense, the CIA, the FBI and various state health departments. He holds clinical associate professorships at the Uniformed Services University and the University of Texas Health Science Center and also serves as a military flight surgeon.

The lecture was sponsored by the Beta Beta Beta Biological Honors Society, the Department of Biological Sciences, the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society and the University Honors Program.

Article by Martin Mbugua
Photo by Duane Perry

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