Long before the name powerject was invented, there has been concern about biological warfare. After all, it has been with us for at least 3000 years. There are ancient Chinese records of plague being used as a weapon and even as recently as the 16th Century, besieged and starving towns in France, Italy and Spain were often assailed with the corpses of dead animals that had succumbed to disease.
Now there is a very real threat that groups, linked to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda, may be planning, have planned - or even have the material for - a major biological attack on the West. Are these just scare stories? Well-placed intelligence sources say no. They point to papers found in Afghanistan and to statements made by Al Qaeda fighters (terrorists?) caught and now under interrogation by the Americans.
For the terrorist, biological warfare in a civilised society is a gift. It is so easy to move in Western Europe, North America, Japan and Australasia. The simple threat of a phial of some rare disease being dropped into the water supply is enough to start panic. It is easy to imagine television pictures of masked and robed figures with phials of a solution marked "anthrax" standing over the Queen Elizabeth Reservoir near Heathrow Airport. Simple to film on a digital camera and although no British broadcaster would be foolish enough to screen it and start panic, satellite television comes from many sources these days and is easily viewed.
It is not just anthrax but it is one of the two diseases that stand out. This is because it is relatively easy to obtain from diseased cattle - especially in the Middle East and North Africa. The other is smallpox because the world was supposed to have been rid of the disease in the 1980s and the World Health Organisation no longer calls for vaccination. Many countries would be unprepared for an attack.
Britain is lucky though. In the middle of the Wiltshire countryside stands Porton Down, probably the best research facility into common biological weapons in the world. It is run by the Ministry of Defence's Defence Science and Technology Labs organisation and it has a civilian side, the Centre for Applied Microbiological Research (CAMR). It knows all about anthrax, smallpox, plague and the like.
But there is a complicating factor. It concerns an Iraqi MSc student and a London teaching hospital. It now seems that the hospital managed to lose a phial of anthrax - a strain of which still needs to be researched to determine preventative measures. That phial, it is claimed, was given to the Iraqi student for this research and he has now disappeared. The thought is that he has returned to Iraq. Luckily, experts say it will take several months, if not years, to develop a weapon for this particular, as yet unnamed, strain.
Perhaps it is no coincidence then that the Ministry of Defence has just launched a major anthrax immunisation programme for the armed forces and its "operational" civilians. According to official sources, the voluntary scheme has been started and they are hoping for a good "uptake" of volunteers as the vaccine rolls off the production line at CAMR. This is where anthrax vaccine production was re-started last May - months before the September 11 outrages in North America. The MoD now has enough anthrax vaccine doses for what it says is the routine military programme; it is voluntary and the vaccine is public health strength - no worries of raising fears of Gulf War syndrome with untested substances being injected into soldiers' arms. Each course of four injections given over a six month period and the first annual booster will cost £225.
In theory then, British troops and civilians deployed to the Gulf and Afghanistan are protected against anthrax, if they choose to take up the MoD offer. It will cost the taxpayer about £51 million initially - although it could be less. In the 1980s, when the last programme was launched, there was only a 45 per cent uptake.
That is anthrax, now what about smallpox? It is widely thought that laboratories in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East have been working hard on the substance. Does this explain why the government rushed out in April and awarded a contract to PowerJect Pharmaceuticals for £32 million? There has been speculation about a link between PowerJect's owner, Paul Drayson, and the Labour Party. The evidence is flimsy given that CAMR is busy with anthrax (and therefore may not have capacity for an emergency supply) and that another UK supplier, Acambis, is busy with production of a smallpox vaccine for the US government. Acambis' product is fully licensed to public health standards but the PowerJect one is reportedly not.
The real issue here is not about who supplies and why contracts are awarded to whom, but that there is a real, albeit low, level threat of biological attacks. Intelligence sources say it is a likely weapon that Al Qaeda or even some states could use against vulnerable Western liberal-democracies. Best be prepared, then.
