AS the nuclear arms race escalated in the early 1950s, the US launched Atoms
for Peace, a drive to promote the good things the atom might do. Whatever you
think of nuclear power, it鈥檚 hard to deny that nuclear physics and radioisotopes
for medicine and research have been good things.
Recent alarm about biological weapons may now give us a similar opportunity.
We could call it germs for peace. Bioweapons have yet to produce a Hiroshima, or
even a small atrocity (that we know of). But some demented people have tried
them, and more are likely to. So countries are now negotiating a long overdue
verification agreement to go with the 1972 treaty banning bioweapons. If they
succeed, member states will have to declare what they are doing with microbes,
and allow investigators in if anyone raises serious suspicions.
But the original treaty was also about the peaceful uses of biology. It
called for rich countries to help poor ones combat disease. This wasn鈥檛 merely
altruistic. Rich countries wanted poor ones to join the treaty, but most
developing countries have more pressing concerns than hypothetical bioweapons.
So the rich nations promised biomedical investment for those that signed.
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Little of this ever materialised, but now the poor countries want action as
part of the planned verification agreement. This time it may happen, in the form
of a plan to help poor countries to monitor diseases
(see p 16).
Rich countries stand to benefit as much as poor ones, as 鈥渆merging鈥�
infections caused by novel pathogens are one of the 21st century鈥檚 more
egalitarian menaces. To face them, we need to keep a close watch on infections
worldwide. This requires top-quality medical laboratories for diagnosis and
epidemiological analysis. These are rare. Even India could not reliably diagnose
a suspected pneumonic plague outbreak in 1994. It got foreign help, but fast
local action would have been better. Africa is especially short of laboratories,
yet nearly half the potentially world-threatening, novel infections investigated
by the WHO are African. The 鈥減eaceful uses鈥� part of the bioweapons treaty may
yet bring rich and poor together.
The issue is politically sensitive. To assess whether outbreaks are natural
or illicit you need to know the epidemiological background, and this will
require international monitors. Developing countries quite rightly want any
investment in disease monitoring to be just that鈥攏ot a way in for foreign
military snoopers.
The investment, if it happens, will have to be purely civilian. Members of
the treaty are discussing collaborating on regional epidemiologial laboratories,
quite separate from any formal effort to watch for biological attack.
Strangely, this may become the biological weapons treaty鈥檚 greatest
achievement. It may or may not stop biowarriors. But natural disease is a much
deadlier enemy. Any effort to even monitor its onslaught deserves support.
