Biosecurity and Bioterrorism

by Mark Rowe

Author: Jeffrey R Ryan

ISBN No: 9780128020296

Review date: 29/03/2024

No of pages: 394

Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann

Publisher URL:
http://store.elsevier.com

Year of publication: 30/03/2016

Brief:

Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Containing and Preventing Biological Threats

price

£51.84

Biological attacks are not easy for terrorists to do – if they were, terrorists would have done so, says the author of a book on the topic.

Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Containing and Preventing Biological Threats, is a 2016 second edition by Jeffrey R Ryan, of a book that came out in 2008. If that is so – that extremists whether the so-called lone wolves or groups of the extreme left or right have not made bio-weapons – why bother with the subject? Because it’s one of those low probability but extreme consequence risks. As Ryan sets out, if an attacker gets an anthrax attack right, it could kill millions. And as with many ‘what ifs’, we can imagine the consequences, but how to measure the likelihood of an attack happening? Is the risk very low, or real? Hence Ryan’s original book, and the new edition, as the threat is alas not going away, making the subject of interest for healthcare security managers (how to manage the fear and panic if an unknown pathogen appears to be causing illness let alone death) and security for labs that are researching in this field.

Some of the book, and the risk assessment, depends on intelligence on terror groups: do they wish to ‘weaponise’ biological agents, and do they have the means, and the methods to deliver it to a target? Ryan airs the risk of a ‘laboratory mishap’ (and offers a Soviet Cold War case study), and with the outbreak of Ebola reminds us that we ought to remain vigilant. The author has to take us through some biological as much as counter-terrorism; hence some chilling details of plague, smallpox and the like; and emerging diseases, that malicious actos may exploit just as they may spread a hoax through powders.

That takes us a third into the book. Then Ryan covers how to respond – offering the catchy concept RAIN (recognise, avoid, isolate and notify) – and what an outbreak might mean for farm animals and land and people. UK stories covered include BSE (mad cow disease); and the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001. However as in so many cases as the author is North American, the laws and institutions he goes into are from that region.

What of the future? Ryan wonders aloud if we may face – and that it’s ‘increasingly possible’ that we may face – ‘an attack with a pathogen that has been deliberately engineered for increased virulence’ and is resistant to antibiotics. As he points out, nature can make pathogens without human help – such as avian and swine flu. We can no more predict what next if anything will come in germ warfare than we can predict whether men will fly deliberately into skyscrapers.

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