-Caveat Lector-
Thursday January 14, 7:07 am Eastern Time
Company Press Release
FEATURE/Are 'Bioterrorists' Ready to Strike? Reader's Digest Warns U.S. is
Unprepared to Meet Threat
Anthrax, Other Deadly Germs are Easy to Conceal; Iraq or Other Enemy Could
Kill Millions in Surprise Attack
PLEASANTVILLE, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE FEATURES)--Jan. 14, 1999-- A small
glass jar, dropped at a New York subway station, quietly spreads death to
thousands of commuters.
A mysterious crop duster, spotted over Washington, D.C., infects up to 3
million residents with fatal anthrax spores.
Movie mayhem? Science-fiction scenarios? Unfortunately not -- the threat of
biological attack, right here at home, is increasingly real. The January
1999 issue of Reader's Digest magazine spells out just how easy such an
attack might be, and why bioterrorism is an urgent concern at the highest
levels of U.S. government.
Anthrax, smallpox and bubonic plague have all been ``weaponized'' in
easy-to-spread form, the magazine warns in ``Are We Ready for Bioterror?''
Health and security officials fear the Ebola and Marburg fevers -- for
which no vaccine exists -- could someday be used as well.
Whatever the disease of choice, bioweapons are easy to carry and conceal --
and innocent civilians would be dying in agony before authorities even
realized an attack had occurred.
The attackers could even be fellow Americans, warns Reader's Digest
contributing editor Rachel Wildavsky. A Defense Department official tells
her of chilling Internet chat rooms, where violence-prone militia members
swap tips on how to make poisons such as ricin, a castor-bean derivative
that starts to kill on contact.
Most experts, however, believe that only a foreign government would have
the kind of facilities needed to mount a major biological attack. Foreign
governments such as Iraq -- which has previously admitted stockpiling
enough anthrax and botulinum to kill everyone on Earth. While Iraqi
officials now claim to have destroyed this toxic arsenal, few believe this
to be true.
``Recent tensions over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have underscored
our need to understand just what bioterror can do,'' Wildavsky says. ``The
experts who know the most are among the most frightened by it.''
And Iraq is not the only threat. Unemployed Russian scientists may be
peddling their bioweapon expertise to the highest bidders, possibly
including China, India or terrorist forces in Afghanistan.
Whatever the odds of preventing an attack, Wildavsky reports that the U.S.
is shockingly ill-prepared to handle the aftermath:
· Detection is poor. Only two labs in the entire country -- the CDC in
Atlanta, and an Army facility in Maryland -- are equipped to test for a
full range of diseases such as anthrax or smallpox. When an Oregon
religious cult spread salmonella bacteria on restaurant salad bars,
sickening 751 people in 1984, federal investigators were unable to trace
the cause of the outbreak until cult informants came forward more than a
year later.
· No city in America has enough beds or medical staff. While the U.S.
Public Health Service maintains an emergency strike team, the federal
government can only do so much. Each city must have its own emergency plan
and keep it current.
· We're low on vaccines, and much of what we do have is reserved for the
military. Only 7 million usable doses of smallpox vaccine currently exist
for a population of 270 million.
· Our planning for a contagious attack is particularly weak.
Yugoslavia's autocratic rulers were able to halt a 1972 smallpox outbreak
by quarantining the sick with guards and barbed wire. What American city is
prepared to do that?
The best weapon against terrorism is to stop it before it starts, by
convincing our enemies that retribution would be swift and terrible.
Government insiders say that fear of retaliation may be all that is
preventing an Iraq or Iran from putting bioweapons into the hands of its
American-based agents.
But as terrorism expert Steven Emerson tells Reader's Digest, ``We have
blinked too often in the recent confrontation with Iraq. A perception that
we won't necessarily deliver emboldens terrorist groups.''
Col. David Franz (Ret.), former commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research
Institute of Infectious Diseases, believes that ``a mass-casualty
-producing event'' could occur within the next 10 years. Even Defense
Secretary William S. Cohen fears a biological attack on U.S. soil ``is not
a remote possibility but a real probability in the present. Imagine the
horror.''
``Are We Ready for Bioterror?'' in the January 1999 issue of Reader's
Digest magazine, tells why we must prepare to fight that horror, or prepare
to suffer the consequences.
Does the bioterror threat have you concerned? What do you think the U.S.
should do? Share your views at www.readersdigest.com.
Contact:
Reader's Digest
Donna Pierpont
914/244-7540
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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