BW/ The Beginnings

The beginnings

Cheeeeerss!!  

What could be more relaxing than having a beer with your friends? After the day is done you can finally lean back, clink glasses and enjoy your company.

However, if I stuck you into a time machine and catapulted you back to the Middle Ages you probably wouldn’t feel as relaxed. Back in the Dark Ages it was quite common to poison people you wanted to get rid of. It was an easy exercise to slip poison into your drinking buddy’s cup. This is where the habit of clinking glasses comes from. As people were anxious about getting poisoned they knocked there cups together as forcefully as possible so the beer would spill over into all the other cups as well. So much for a relaxing glass of beer.

The beginnings of biological warfare though date back even further! In ancient times the common practice of biological warfare included poisoning arrow tips, tainting water supplies with herbs, fungus and - well, let’s just say it – shit. This way entire cities suffered horrible diarrhea and hallucinations.

The first most big scale event in the history of biological warfare occurred in the 14^th and caused an epidemic which wiped out half of Europe. The epidemic I am talking about is the most severe, deadly and horrifying human history had to see: The  plague! Apparently the disease had its origin in North East Asia and entered Europe through the city of Caffa which lies on the Crimean peninsula. (today’s Ukraine) In the 13^th century Caffa was purchased by the Republic of Genoa and becoming a major trading point. The city was flourishing until it gave refuge to other Italians from the nearby city of Tana who had a dispute with Muslim Mongolians. Following this event the Mongolians, under Janibeg, besieged the city. The besiegers were already partly infected with the plague and so they resorted to catapulting infected bodies over the walls of Caffa.  The Genoese Gabriele de’ Mussi, a contemporary, describes the event as follows:

“The dying Tartars, stunned and stupefied by the immensity of the disaster brought about by the disease, and realizing that they had no hope of escape, lost interest in the siege. But they ordered corpses to be placed in catapults1 and lobbed into the city in the hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside.2 What seemed like mountains of dead were thrown into the city, and the Christians could not hide or flee or escape from them, although they dumped as many of the bodies as they could in the sea. And soon the rotting corpses tainted the air and poisoned the water supply, and the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one in several thousand was in a position to flee the remains of the Tartar army. Moreover one infected man could carry the poison to others, and infect people and places with the disease by look alone. No one knew, or could discover, a means of defense.”

Due to the enorme infectiousness of the disease many of the inhabitants of Caffa fell ill. As Caffa was a port city it is believed that some Genoese could flee back to Italy and brought the plague into Europa. This is possible. Still it is not the siege of Caffa which has to account for the epidemic in Europe. It is rather a time correlation than a cause and effect relationship. The plague would have spread anyway, as trade ships were frequently commuting between the Black Sea and Europe’s harbors. Aboard on those ships were rats, which are one of the most essential disease transmitters. This being said the siege of Caffa still accounts for biological warfare.

BW/ What is biological warfare?

What is biological warfare?

This post will explain the concept of biological warfare and look at some of its terminology.

Fear of the unknown. Of the uncontrollable. Of the silent creeping death. Upon all the other strains biological and chemical warfare also have tremendous physiological impact. Although equal in the horror they can cause, from a scientific point of view, the distinction between biological and chemical warfare is quite obvious.

A chemical weapon is any weapon that uses a manufactured chemical to kill people.

A biological weapon either contains a living microorganism like the plague bacteria, or a toxin, which are the naturally occurring poisons that microorganisms produce. Toxins can also be synthesized. The microorganism or toxin used in manufacturing a biological weapon is commonly referred to as agent. Biological agents are targeted at humans, animals or crop. Widespread illness and death, food shortages or an environmental catastrophe are realistic scenarios in the world of biological or germ warfare.

Biological weapons have been referred to as the poor man’s nuclear bomb. And apparently it is true; producing an effective agent can be quite cheap. However, a biological weapon generally consists of two parts – an agent and a delivery mechanism. The manufacture of the delivery mechanism poses a greater difficulty. 

BW/ Introduction

BIOLOGICAL WARFARE

Do we still have to worry about it? How likely is it that a deadly virus will endager the human species?

Well, I don't want to advertise personal bunkers here but I do feel a bit uneasy after having done some reserach on this topic.


I will start off bluntly and in all honesty. Upon trying to find a good and befitting introduction into the topic of biological warfare I discovered a site with quotes. First I was going to pick a quote about war to start off. Classic- I know. But how go from there? Why is there such a thing as war? Why do people fight people? Don’t worry I am not going to indulge in a philosophical discussion on humanity. Well, oddly enough I found that the topic page of the brainyquote site sums up those reasons quite nicely.

So, after accepting the fact that fighting and warfare is just something that has accompanied human development from its humble beginnings right up to the 21^st century, we can look at the how of warfare in greater detail.

There are basically two types of warfare: symmetric and asymmetric warfare. Symmetric warfare means that the involved opponents are close to equal in power, resources and weaponry. Every opponent knows, more or less, what he can expect from his counterparts. Your “Game of Thrones” swordfights are symmetric warfare.  The term asymmetric warfare is used when opponents have unequal military resources and the “weaker” opponent uses unconventional weapons and tactics to fight the enemy. The term is frequently used to describe guerilla warfare, terrorism and biological warfare.

Throughout this page I want to give you an insight into the topic of biological warfare. First of all the term itself will be explained in more detail. Then we will take a walk through the negative aspects of scientific inventiveness and look at the dirty beginnings of biological warfare up to the 20^th century. Following that we will look at common biological weapons like smallpox, anthrax and typhus and see how they affect their victims. After that we will –just for a few minutes- stand in the shoes of a terrorist, look at the wanted properties of biological weapons, and choose the most dangerous one. Next we will look at biological warfare incidents that have occurred between the 20^th century and now. Then we will try to find out how serious the threat of biological warfare is today and what protection measurements governments have undertaken. Last but not least there will be one entry discussing the theory that AIDS was initially invented as a biological weapon.

I hope it will be interesting and thrilling for you to learn about biological warfare on this site.

Other blogs that relate to my topic and might therefore be interesting to have a look at are:
Military technology by Flavius LeahuStem cells  by Stefanie Edlbauer

Cheers,

Anna

Audio Abstract

Abstract for the paper entitled 

Biological Weapons: A National Security Problem that Requires a Public Health Response

Link:   http://opr.princeton.edu/papers/opr0104.pdf

Audio Abstract

Audio Description

Audio Description

Oh Brother Where Art Though 

Toad Scene

Delmar’s face next to a puddle.

Coming to his senses again, he slowly raises his head as his gaze wanders down his outstretched body.

 Directly opposite to him, his friend Everett also has all his fours stretched out from him.

The two are lying amongst the puddles of a stony riverbank.

Stiffly turning his head Delmar notices their third friend Pete’s clothes. Only that Pete isn’t in them anymore.

Struggling up on his feet, Delmar gapes at Pete’s empty but neatly arranged clothes.

Nervously wobbling back and forth he turns to Everett.

Everett jumps out of his sleep and rubs his head.

 Trying to keep his balance Everett rises stiffly. Following Delmar’s stare he also eyes Pete’s empty clothes. Then he turns away slowly and takes a few steps towards the brim of the riverbank.  Searchingly, he gazes down the river and at the brown forest across from them.

 Delmar is still staring wide-eyed at the wet jeans-shirt.

Everett turns back and fixates the jeans shirt. Delmar’s jaw drops as he is staring at the shirt in which something is crawling towards the collar.A horney toad jumps out of the shirt.

Everett throws back his head and raises his eyebrows. The horney toad makes three jumps across the riverbank and then hops into the water. Delmar chases after it. On all four he leaps into the shallow water.

Then with a dive he manages to grab it. Holding it tightly between his hands he brings the toad up close to his face.

Vucetich on Galton

Vucetich’s admiration for a colleague

“What are you reading darling? Could you please just lift up those heavy books for a moment so I can wipe your side table? Oh, I hate that you smoke in here Juan. One day, you and all your books will stand ablaze.” “Honey, I am not merely reading. I am connecting with Sir Franics Galton, my brother in thought, my brother in crime, one could even say.” “Brother in crime? Juan, what…?” No no, do not worry honey, I am not engaging in any criminal activities. Quite the opposite, Sir Francis Galton made outstanding achievements in the forensic field and after reading his biography, I am not surprised he came to fame. By the age of two this prodigy child was able to read and when he was five he already knew some Latin. Later in life, he went on to study medicine and became an enthusiastic traveler. Among exotic countries like Damascus, Beirut and Egypt he also travelled to my beloved motherland Croatia. 

However, the one specific trait which led him to become a scientific polymath was his penchant for measuring, comparing and identifying patterns.  He excelled in mathematics, meteorology, statistics and geography. It was only when his cousin, who was no less a figure than Charles Darwin, published his Theory of Species that Galton dedicated his life to one specific field, namely, the hereditary of human ability. To paraphrase it, he wanted to scientifically proof that intelligent parents have intelligent children. 

While this is all very fascinating, his findings in the forensic field are those which I was most impressed by. Sir Francis Galton was the first to scientifically prove the uniqueness of human fingerprints, convincing courts to accept them as evidence. On top of that he identified eight common patterns in fingerprints and drew up a system to classify them. In doing so he made fingerprinting implementable. Nowadays, when trying to match a crime scene fingerprint with one that is already in the database, one does not have to go through all the fingerprint cards anymore. When the crime scene fingerprint has a loop I can already narrow my search down to a small fraction and after taking subcategories into account I am usually quick to find a match. You remember the mysterious Rojas case? You know, the woman that strangled her two poor children? I could not have solved it without Galton’s fingerprinting classification technique. [400]

Bertillon on the West Brothers

Bertillon's curse

Before he had to go to bed, little John West zipped through the family home, checking if all his ghost traps were still activated. As he had been doing this every night for three years now, this was a quick undertaking. John was absolutely sure that their New England home in Leavenworth was haunted. Sometimes at night, he heard these inhuman wailing cries. He wasn’t scared though. On the contrary, he was really curious and put all his effort into catching the ghost.

This particular night, when the clock struck twelve, he suddenly woke up. Still confused he rubbed his eyes and suddenly realized that a milky-white figure was sitting on his window-sill. “What are you?” John stuttered. “How rude!” the ghost growled. “Sorry, who are you?” John’s voice was cracking with excitement. “I, I am the father of forensics. I am the famous Alphonse Bertillon” the ghost said as he lent back and crossed his legs. “Bertillonage, how does that sound, boy? Fantastic, does it not?

"Bertillonage is a system with which criminals can be identified by having 11 different body measurements taken and recorded. You know, people always thought I was a bit odd, unsociable and simple-minded but I created this ingenious identification system that was used in criminal institutes worldwide. With Bertillonage I put an end to repeat offenders masquerading as someone innocent and getting away with mild punishments. I thought the system infallible. You know what the odds of two people having the exact same measurements are? One to 4,191,304! Ingenious, I know. Bertillonage finally got me the praise I deserved.

"However, in 1903 your great-grandfather, Will West, put an end to my glory days. When he was caught, an officer took his measurements and identified him as the repeat offender William West. When your great-grandfather denied having been arrested before, the police officer turned the record over and saw that William West was already an inmate of the prison.

"Then those fingerprinting people were summoned and established what my Bertillonage could not – that Will and William West were in fact two different people. Afterwards, Bertillonage was disregarded as unreliable and replaced by fingerprinting. The thing is that your great-grandfather’s case was an exception because he and William were actually twin brothers! If they had just admitted that my system would not have been called a failure!" [392]