A Civil War plot to spread yellow fever failed because nobody knew about mosquitoes
In 1864 a Confederate agent shipped trunks of clothing from yellow fever victims in Bermuda toward Northern cities, hoping to start epidemics. The scheme was hopeless: the disease spreads by mosquito, not cloth, a fact nobody then understood. Attempts to weaponise disease have a long, often bungling history.
Bioterrorism means deliberately releasing bacteria, viruses, fungi, insects or their toxins to cause harm and fear. The agents usually occur in nature. Their appeal to attackers lies in cheapness, difficulty of detection and a delay of hours or days before anyone falls ill, and in the panic they generate far beyond the physical damage. Armies have found them awkward weapons, since it is hard to strike an enemy without hitting one's own troops. Some agents, like smallpox, pass between people; others, like anthrax, do not.
Not every attack targets humans. Assaults on farming, called agrobioterrorism, could wreck economies and shake consumer confidence. Foot-and-mouth disease barely infects people, yet outbreaks in Britain in 2001 and 2007 showed how much economic damage and public alarm it causes.
The historical record is full of attempts. The Civil War agent was Dr. Luke P. Blackburn. During the First World War, Germany ran a sabotage campaign against horses and mules: Anton Dilger set up a home laboratory in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in 1915 and had Baltimore dockworkers infect horses bound for Britain with glanders. He was suspected but never arrested and died in Madrid in the 1918 influenza pandemic. German efforts against French cavalry horses and Russian pack animals slowed troops and supply convoys. In 1972 Chicago police detained Allen Schwander and Stephen Pera, two college students accused of plotting to taint the city's water with typhoid; they jumped bail and fled to Cuba.
Accidents have taught as much as plots. In 1979 anthrax spores escaped from a military laboratory near Sverdlovsk, killing around 66 people. Soviet officials blamed contaminated meat, but investigation traced the outbreak to inhaled spores, and it became a major source of medical knowledge about inhalational anthrax. The technologist Bill Joy has warned that genetic engineering could hand far greater power to future attackers.
Source: Bioterrorism
