Bioterror and biosafety
October 19th, 2001
By Vandana Shiva
The reports of anthrax cases in Florida and New York have put a renewed focus
on bioterrorthe risks and hazards posed by biological agents. From the
U.S. to India, Governments are on high alert. Even the World Health Organisation
has issued warnings. Americans and Europeans have been stockpiling gas masks
and antibiotics, and images of policemen and investigators in biohazard suits
have started to make front-page appearances in newspapers and magazines.
The panic and fear being spread about biohazards in the post-September 11
period is so different from the complacency earlier, even though the threat
to public health and the environment from hazardous biological agents is not
new. If we have to respond adequately and consistently to bioterror, we need
to take two basic issues into account. Firstly, infective biological agents
cause disease and kill, irrespective of who spreads them and how they spread.
The current paranoia arises from the fear that they could get into terrorist
hands.
However, terrorists can get them because they are around. And they pose hazards
even if they are not in terrorist hands. As Vaclav Havel, President of the
Czech Republic, said in his opening remarks of Forum 2000 in Prague on 14th
October, Bin Laden did not invent bacterial agents. They were
invented in defence or corporate labs. Anthrax has been part of the ascend
of biological warfare of the very states which are today worried about bioterrorism.
And genetic engineering of biological organisms, both for warfare and food
and agriculture, is creating new biohazards, both intended and unintended.
Secondly, it is fully recognised that stronger public health systems is the
only response to bioterrorism. However, precisely at a time when public health
reports are needed most, they are being dismantled under privatisation and
trade liberalisation pressures. Bioterrorism should help governments recognise
that we desperately need strong biosafety regulation and public health systems.
The global citizens movement and the movement of concerned scientists for
biosafety have been alerting Governments to the ecological and health risks
of genetic engineering and therefore the imperative to test, assess and regulate
the release of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into the environment.
This basic conflict over the need to assess GMOs for biohazards was at the
heart of negotiations that stretched over a decade under the aegis of the
United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity and were finally concluded
in February 2000 in Montreal on the Protocol on Biosafety.
There are two major concerns for potential risks of biohazards from GMOs.
Firstly, the vectors used for introducing genes from one organism to another
to make a GMO are highly infectious and virulent biological agents. It is,
in fact, their infectious nature which makes them useful as vectors to introduce
alien genes into biological organisms. The risks of the use of virulent vectors
for engineering novel life forms have not been assessed. And their use for
bioterrorism becomes easier as they spread commercially around the world.
Secondly, since GMOs are novel organisms which have not existed in nature,
their impact on the environment and on human health is not known. Ignorance
of the impact is being treated as proof of safety, a totally unscientific
approach. This has been called a don't look, don't see approach
to biosafety.
Biowarfare or bioterrorism is the deliberate use of living organisms to kill
people. When economic policies based on trade liberalisation and globalisation
deliberately spread fatal and infectious diseases such as AIDS, TB and malaria,
by dismantling health and medical systems, they too become instruments of
bioterror. This is the way citizens groups have organised worldwide against
the TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement and GATS
(General Agreement on Trade in Services) of the WTO. TRIPS imposes patents
and monopolies on drugs, taking essential medicines beyond the reach of the
poor.
For example, AIDS medicine, which costs $200 without patents, costs $20,000
with patents. TRIPS and patents on medicines become recipes for spreading
disease and death because they take cure beyond peoples reach. Similarly,
privatisation of health systems as imposed by the World Bank under SAPS (Structural
Adjustment Programmes) and also proposed in GATS, spreads infectious diseases
because low cost, decentralised public health systems are withdrawn and dismantled.
These are also forms of bioterror. They are different from the acts of terrorists
only because they are perpetrated by the powerful, not the marginalised and
the excluded and they are committed for the fanaticism of the free market
ideology, not fundamentalist religious ideologies. But in impact they are
the same. They kill innocent people and species by spreading disease.
Stopping the spread of bioterror at all these levels requires stopping the
proliferation of technologies which create potentially hazardous biological
organisms. It also requires stopping the proliferation of economic and trade
policies which are crippling public health systems, spreading infectious diseases
and leaving societies more vulnerable to bioterrorism.
Vandana Shiva is Director, Research Foundation for Science, Technology and
Ecology, New Delhi.
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