Biology The following pages give access to a collection of short review articles on the basic biology of biological agents:
- Toxins are poisons produced by living organisms.
- Bioregulators are related to regulatory substances normally found in the body that control blood pressure, heart rate, and other critical functions.
- Biological Warfare Organisms are disease-producing organisms, including viruses, bacteria, and rickettsiae. Summary tables of the stability, incubation time, and mode of entrance for some major biological agents are provided.
Biological Weapons
Biological agents must be delivered or disseminated in order to induce illness. Biological Dissemination covers some of the basics of how biological warfare agents are spread.
Biological Weapons Prohibitions
The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, formally the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction, was signed at London, Moscow and Washington on 10 April 1972, and entered into force on 26 March 1975. It is the most recent international treaty that bans biological weapons; it is regularly reviewed and updated.
United States Biological Arsenal
The United States manufactured and maintained biological weapons during the height of the Cold War. In 1969, President Nixon decided that the US would destroy its biological stockpile; the order was carried out during the period 1971-2.
The lethal biological agents had been loaded into biological weapons; the anticrop agents had been stockpiled, but not weaponized.
Links
- Medical Management of Biological Casualties. Handbook, Third Edition, U.S. Army Medical Research Institute Of Infectious Diseases, Fort Detrick, Frederick, Maryland, July 1998.
- Biological Agent Information Papers summarize information about a number of biological warfare agents of interest to the US military.
- The Centers for Disease Control's Division of Bacterial and Mycotic Diseases web page on Disease Information.
- The Federation of American Scientists Chemical and Biological Arms Control Program covers all aspects of chemical and biological weapons and their control, but concentrates, at present, on efforts to prevent the development and use of biological weapons and the further proliferation of BW programs.
A few links to media coverage of biological warfare:
- The Specter of Biological Weapons, and article in Scientific American by Leonard A. Cole.
- Plague War, a PBS Frontline report on the growing threat of biological weapons in the world, biological warfare, bioagents, bioterrorism and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union's secret biological weapons program which included anthrax, plague and smallpox.
Although it appears that it is no longer archived online, it is worth noting that the Journal of the American Medical Association's August 6, 1997 special issue on biological warfare (vol. 278, no. 5) contains a wide variety of articles and opinion pieces; it should be available through most libraries.
Help for Emergency Responders
| The National Domestic Preparedness Office (NDPO) was created to coordinate all federal efforts, including those of the Department of Defense, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency, to assist state and local emergency responders with planning, training, equipment, and exercise needs necessary to respond to a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) incident. If you are an emergency responder interested in additional information, you may contact the NDPO at (202) 324-9025 or e-mail them at ndpo@leo.gov.
The US Department of Justice Office for Domestic Preparedness has a Support Helpline.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provide a set of recommended notification procedures for local and state public health department leaders in the event of a bioterrorist incident. |