Pathogen Shifts

"Never have we had to fight such a battle, to protect so many people against so many threats that are so silent and so lethal."

That's Sen. Bill Frist's bottom line in a speech he gave at Harvard on June 1, which appears today in Real Clear Politics. Frist sees ahead an inevitable pathogen crisis, when new, more virulent diseases descend on a world ill-prepared to defend itself. Take, for example, avian flu:

For the virus that is currently the greatest threat, the Avian flu, a vaccine would not become available, at best, until six to nine months after the outbreak of a pandemic. Even then that vaccine would not be available en masse. And even then we do not know if that vaccine would work. It is still experimental. So, in essence, we have no vaccine for Avian flu. Nor do we have enough of the anti-viral agent Tamiflu to treat more than one percent of our population for the Avian flu. To acquire more anti-viral agent, we would need to get in line behind Britain and France and Canada who have tens of millions of doses on order. And where must the world’s only factory in Switzerland go to get the raw materials needed to manufacture Tamiflu? To Asia, to the region that will be hit earliest and likely hardest, and, specifically, to China and only China.

As if the natural "pathogen shift" made possible by wildlife living in closer proximity to domestic animals, and more people having the wealth to eat domestic animals, weren't bad enough, there's the matter of deliberate infection attacks by terrorists:

Who would gamble that if the terrorist enemy possessed even a single nuclear charge, he would fail to devote all his resources to its detonation in the midst of the maximum number of innocents? And though not as initially dramatic as a nuclear blast, biological warfare is potentially far more destructive than the kind of nuclear attack feasible at the operational level of the terrorist, and biological war is itself distressingly easy to wage.

As the commission on intelligence capabilities reported to the President two months ago: “Biological weapons are cheaper and easier to acquire than nuclear weapons -- and they could be more deadly. The threat is deeply troubling today; it will be more so tomorrow….”

Dr. Frist's call for a "new Manhattan Project" is compelling. If I were like my cousin Chris, who's career involves genetics and such, I'd be signing up.