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the next two weeks, representatives from over 100 nations are meeting
in Geneva, Switzerland to consider what should be done to strengthen
adherence to a l972 ban on the development and production of biological-weapons
agents known as the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC).
The Bush administration
has done a great deal to blast reality into these talks by demanding
that anything agreed to actually produce better results than the
status quo. Certainly, the administration's proposals make far more
sense than what other nations have tabled. Yet, with regard to the
critical issue of international monitoring of infectious diseases,
even the White House's levelheaded suggestions, fall short of what
could be accomplished without international negotiations through
sensible unilateral actions.
A quick review
of the bidding reveals why.
Earlier in
July, the Bush administration took the sensible step of withdrawing
from negotiations to secure a legally binding protocol to the BWC.
The protocol being negotiated would have required a variety of inspections
of civilian biological-research laboratories along with defense-related
facilities. Unfortunately, the inspections procedures, which were
supposed to ferret out illicit biological research, were egregiously
prone to produce false positives — i.e., false evidence of
weapons-related activity where there, in fact, was none. Worse still,
such false positives were far more likely to manifest themselves
with regard to innocent parties in advanced nations (where far more
suspect facilities would be opened up for inspection) than in the
case of guilty parties who would be more inclined to maintain covert
programs to evade such inspections. Reaching agreement to the proposed
protocol, in short, would have been worse than having no agreement
at all.
Bush administration
officials understood this, pulled out of the negotiations, and devised
a much more reasonable list of proposals for members of the BWC
to consider. The first three of these make eminent sense. Each member
of the BWC should criminalize private citizens' development, acquisition,
production, or use of biological weapons in their national laws.
The BWC's membership should also agree on an international set of
standards as to who should have access to dangerous germs, toxins,
and viruses to do needed defensive research. In addition, the members
of the BWC need to develop mechanisms for investigating outbreaks
of infectious disease. At present there are no such procedures.
The last American
suggestion — that all members to the BWC agree to support the
World Health Organization's effort to monitor outbreaks of infectious
disease — also seems quite sensible. It is no substitute, however,
for unilateral action. Indeed, unlike the administration's other
proposals, which require international concurrence, the American
proposal regarding health monitoring is one that ought not to wait
upon any agreement.
The World Health
Organization, it turns out, has been trying for some time to get
all of its members to monitor the outbreak of infectious diseases.
The problem is that so far, it has only be able to get its membership
to agree to look out for and report on three sicknesses — yellow
fever, plague, and cholera. The reporting, moreover, is generally
limited to passing on information regarding confirmed outbreaks,
rather the type of preliminary data that is needed to contain such
outbreaks in a much more timely fashion.
Backing this
sort of reporting conservatism may make sense if you are an underdeveloped
nation fearful of losing tourism dollars but it makes no sense if
you need early warning of the possible outbreak of a vast array
of infectious diseases before they spread out of control.
The U.S. government understands this. That's why in response to
September 11th, it authorized the expansion of an inexpensive, proven
reporting system already working in New Mexico, known as R.S.V.P.
(Rapid Syndrome Validation Project), to additional U.S. states.
RSVP uses computers,
touch-screen entry, and the Internet to enable doctors to make speedy
reports to public health authorities when they encounter patients
who have a particular set of symptoms. A report can be filed in
less than a minute, assumes no prior knowledge of exotic diseases,
and covers over 90 percent of the diseases a biological-weapons
attack might inflict. The program is also cheap. The system's developer,
Dr. Alan Zelicoff of Sandia Laboratory, estimates that a basic global
system of 10,000 reporting stations could be put on line for approximately
$20 million.
Getting such
health-monitoring stations installed needn't wait on international
support for the World Health Organization, of U.S. proposals at
Geneva, or even of the BWC. Instead, the U.S. could seek out partners
to set up health-monitoring stations in both disease-stricken and
advanced nations, and do so without delay. The immediate benefit
would be to improve international public-health reporting. The long-term
payoff would be to establish a baseline against unusual events,
such as bioterrorist attacks or epidemics. These could, then, be
identified early enough to prevent harm from coming to any nation's
general population.
Taking this
tact, of course, would not require an international treaty or protocol.
Yet, it's still well worth doing. Indeed, the alternative, quite
literally, is a prescription for deadly delay.
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