World's doctors warn of germ warfare risk
Date: 05-Oct-01
Country: SWITZERLAND
Author: Richard Waddington
The group, bringing together doctors' associations from 72 countries, said the threat posed by such weaponry demanded vigilance from all sectors - governments down to individual physicians.
"The WMA called on governments to acknowledge and act on the extreme danger of chemical and biological weapons," the association said in a statement issued at the start of a special three-day meeting of its governing council.
The WMA had been scheduled to hold its annual assembly in New Delhi but the gathering was called off in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks in the United States. A smaller council meeting was convened instead for the French town of Ferney-Voltaire, near the Swiss border.
Doctors said they were deeply concerned that any future attacks might involve the use of biological weapons that had the potential to be even more lethal than last month's assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Some 6,000 people died or are missing and presumed dead after pilots slammed planes into the landmarks in attacks which the United States says were orchestrated by Saudi-born Islamic militant Osama bin Laden.
The WMA said a programme of education for doctors and health workers was required in order to ensure they could quickly detect symptoms of a chemical or biological attack. The WMA also called for greater international cooperation between health services.
INSIDIOUS RISK
A WMA report presented at the meeting pointed out that any attack with biological weapons was likely to be insidious rather than instantly dramatic, with infections possibly spreading for days or even weeks until detected.
"The release of organisms causing smallpox, plague and anthrax could prove catastrophic in terms of the resulting illnesses and deaths, compounded by the panic such outbreaks would generate," it said.
"We have to increase our vigilance and improve coordination between military defence and medical areas," the president of the American Medical Association, Richard Corlin, told Reuters.
This was because the first sign that any biological attack had been carried out would probably come with the appearance of a just a few patients at a clinic.
"We need to ensure that we will be quick off the mark. In dealing with a biological weapon attack, the key is the speed of the response. This means quickly identifying that it has taken place," Corlin said.
"The level of readiness is only spotty. I don't think we have in place the systems needed," he added.
The WMA report noted that advances in biological and genetic research had made it easier for groups of would-be attackers to obtain weapons of germ warfare. It was also often difficult to tell the difference between programmes of legitimate medical research and weapons production, it added.
The United States briefly grounded crop-dusting planes following the New York and Washington attacks on fears they could be used to spread toxic chemicals or germs.
