The Danger of Germ Warfare

By M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
Sometimes known as "bioterrorism," these weapons involve infectious agents and toxins. These can include fungi, viruses and bacteria, and depending on their characteristics can kill human, animal and/or plant life. 

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Assyrians contaminated their enemy's wells with rye ergot fungus

The qualities that makes germ warfare lethal and effective are the ones that make them unpredictable. We are talking about non-human, living organisms that are resilient and can be used as weapons, but are dangerously difficult to control. These organisms do not respect treaties or borders between countries, or for that matter continents. Even ancient civilizations understood how effective biological warfare was to bring an enemy to their knees.

Five hundred years before the birth of Christ, Assyrians contaminated their enemy's wells with rye ergot fungus. This fungus contains chemicals related to LSD. They knew it was inevitable that water would be ingested, and that it produced confused mental states, hallucinations and even death.

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Metropolitan Alexis Healing the Tatar Queen Taidula from Blindness while Janibeg Looks on

​In 1334, a plague blossomed in China where five million people died. This amounted to two-thirds of China's population. It was carried along trade routes, and made its way west, hitting Mesopotamia, Syria and India.

In 1343, Mongol warriors known as Tartars, led by Jani Beg of the Golden Horde, lay siege against  Kaffa, a Genoese cathedral city and a port central to the trade industry located on the Crimean Peninsula of the Black Sea.

The Tartars turned their own misfortune into a weapon by flinging infected bodies of their own dead over the city walls using catapults. These warriors had died from the plague. The rotting bodies poisoned the water supply, causing death among the city’s inhabitants, despite being quickly dumped into the sea. Hoping to escape the plague, four ships sailed from Kaffa to Italy.

The ships brought the disease to Venice, and from there it spread to Italy and the rest of Europe. Known as the Black Death, it impacted European history and killed over 25 million people.

Genome sequencing has found the origins of the Black Death started in China over 2000 years ago.

The Plague (Yersinia pestis) is a gram-negative coccobacillus. It is a zoonotic disease, meaning it can be transmitted from animals to humans and vice versa. There are three primary forms: bubonic plague, septicemic plague and pneumonic plague.

It was discovered in 1894 by Alexandre Yersin and Kitasato Shibasaburo during the Hong Kong plague epidemic. It was later found to be transmitted via the bite of a flea that has fed on infected rodents.

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The Japanese army poisoned more than 1,000 water wells in Chinese villages to study cholera and typhus outbreaks. [...] Some of the epidemics they caused persisted for years and continued to kill more than 30,000 people in 1947, long after the Japanese had surrendered.

​—Dr. Friedrich Frischknecht, professor of integrative parasitology, Heidelberg University, Germany 

Japanese Special Naval Landing Forces in Battle of Shanghai c.1937

During WWII nations involved looked into developing anthrax spores, brucellosis and botulism toxins. Thankfully the Allies never used them. The Japanese though did drop ceramic bombs full of bubonic infected fleas on Ningbo, China.

​Bioterrorism can be implemented with aerosol sprays, explosives or intentional contamination of food and water supplies. Some pathogens are hardier than others, and this determines how it will be deployed.

Unfortunately this type of warfare holds an appeal for terrorists as it is low-tech to produce and distribute. Since there is a delay in contamination it allows the perpetrator time to escape. In a battlefield scenario, military personnel from both sides can be infected. Present day most experts believe that the organism that causes anthrax would be used in a bioterrorism attack. It is easily found in nature or can be produced in a laboratory. It is versatile in the ways it can be spread and it survives a long time in different environments.

​In 2001 anthrax spores were sent through the postal system, five of twenty-two people infected, died. The person who sent it was never caught.

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Smallpox quarantine order, California, c. 1910

Smallpox, unlike anthrax can be transmitted from one person to another. Due to vaccination efforts it has mostly been wiped out. The last case dates to 1978 when medical photographer, Janet Parker contracted smallpox at the University of Birmingham Medical school. She died on September 11, 1978. How she became infected remains unknown, however it was determined the source was a variola virus grown for research purposes at the medical school lab.

​The virus is still kept in two laboratories, one in the United States, the other in Russia.

However it has been proven that sources for disease can be found outside of laboratories. On March 31, 2003, in Santa Fe, New Mexico inside an 1888 book on Civil War medical practices, smallpox scabs were found inside an envelope. They were turned over to the CDC.

In July, 2014 six sealed glass vials of smallpox dating back to 1954, along with vials of pathogens were found in a cold storage room in an FDA lab in Maryland. These were turned over to the CDC which found at least two vials had samples that were viable in culture. 

In 2017, an extinct horse pox virus of the variola virus was recreated at the University of Alberta. This proved that a virus can be recreated even if samples are destroyed. This calls into question dual use research.

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Given the presence and availability of plague around the world, the capacity for mass production and aerosol dissemination, the high fatality rate of pneumonic plague, and the potential for rapid secondary spread, the potential use of plague as a biological weapon is of great concern.

—Dr. Stefan Riedel, Department of Pathology, Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas, TX

Illustration of a medieval plague doctor

Cholera is a disease that causes deadly gastrointestinal complications in humans, and would have to be added to major water sources in order to affect large amounts of the population.

Another deadly infectious disease is tularemia, which only needs less than 10 organisms to enter the body before causing infection. It produces fever, ulcerations, swelling of the lymph glands and in some cases pneumonia. It is hardy, can stay active in decaying carcasses, moist soils, cold water and hay for many weeks. Symptoms would show up 3 to 5 days after infection and without antibiotic treatment it can lead quickly to respiratory failure and death.

These are only a few of the pathogens that can be used as biological weapons.

Even though disease has been used to conquer enemies for hundreds of years, in modern times we face the potential of a gene editing technology known as CRISPR. It can edit genomes and modify DNA sequences to alter gene function. It can be used to correct genetic defects, but in the wrong hands can be used as a weapon of mass destruction. It could be used to create drug-resistant strains of disease or insects that are not exterminated by pesticides and can wipe out a country's staple crop. 

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