Invisible Threat

Invisible Threat

2013, Health  -   35 Comments
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Ratings: 7.33/10 from 63 users.

It's bad enough to catch a disease naturally but to take a disease and turn it into a weapon, to enhance the disease, to make it more virulent or more contiguous or more resistant to known vaccines it just kind of goes off the charts there. It's turning Mother Nature against us. Weapons that destroy by spreading deadly diseases have a long and unhappy history. Billions of dollars have been spent by governments to create pathogens that can cause fatal illnesses. Even today some countries are stockpiling just such a deadly arsenal.

In a widely reported news conference Syria has admitted as much. The World Health Organization called the deliberate contamination of our food one of the major biological threats of the twenty first century. In the modern globalized economy where food gets transported all over the world there are a lot of opportunities for somebody to contaminate the food with biological agents. It is kind of frightening when you think of the multitude of different pathogens somebody could introduce, either in a large population or a small targeted population. There are cases in our not so distant past where people have done that.

The most serious biological attack in US history was carried out not by foreign terrorists but by the followers of a homegrown religious cult. Salad bars in ten local restaurants were deliberately contaminated with salmonella. Seven hundred and fifty one people were poisoned and forty five hospitalized as disciples of Guru Rajneeshee sought to incapacitate voters and see their own candidates win the 1984 Wasco County election.

The salmonella incident occurred in the United States but biological attacks could happen anywhere in the world and so far there has not been a coordinated global plan about how to deal with this. The word terrorism evokes images of airplanes crashing into office towers or bombs blowing up in markets. These remain real threats. So do attacks by chemicals, mustard gas, defoliants, or nerve agents, but there is something even more insidious - biological weapons.

That's the whole point of terrorism, to put enormous psychological pressure on the audience that they're trying to reach, if we're talking about biological agents. They're unseen in many cases, you can't smell them so for that very reason those kinds of weapons have a much more powerful psychological impact on target audiences. Even killing five people with a bio-agent would be scarier than killing two hundred people with an explosive device.

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Eric Reinholt
Eric Reinholt
2 years ago

Wow, such an important documentary, but you don't care about people who can't see very well. Finish this documentary by providing English voiceovers for foreign languages.

suzanne petersen
suzanne petersen
5 years ago

Soviet Union sees that countries are agreeing not to produce biological weapons, so they decide in secret to produce them. Israel does the same. When this is revealed despite their wishes, they protest that is because Germany attacked them in the the past and so they must be ready to defend themselves. That
is also what Germany thought. Netanyahoo and the like have become hitler and they are itching for an opportunity to prove their power.

aman
aman
10 years ago

biological attack is a strong attack that harms urs heart as well as ur mind

rada
rada
10 years ago

Biological attack is very strong effect on the psyche. The bomb went off this one-time stress. And then you sit and think, or get infected will not get infected.

mikeysbro
mikeysbro
10 years ago

Its interesting that history records various thieves vinegars from both France and England. One such vinegar found in the paris pharmacologica 6th edition 1825 (from earlier times by a cardinal wolsey 1473-1530) one can read that during the plague of Marseilles thieves "plundered the dead bodies with perfect security and upon being arrested stated on condition of their lives being spared that the use of aromatic vinegar had spared them the influence of the contagion" Now I wouldn't suggest that anyone use these vinegars but rather research them on their own accord ...some terms that may assist in searching may include; four thieves, thieves vinegars, paris pharmacologica 6 edition 1825 and so forth. History is indeed filled with ancient jewels of knowledge worth looking at.

systems1000
systems1000
10 years ago

Putting someone else under observation for your own insane mistakes will not solve your problem.IT will only make it worse.

Glen
Glen
10 years ago

Sad mankind is so dumb , this cold war, space race , secret Astronauts funded by CIA etc to spy on us ,spies military spending all monies that could have given all a better life.
Once USSA goes broke things might change.

dewflirt
dewflirt
10 years ago

Only one way to protect yourself from germful weapons - stop breathing :)

dmxi
dmxi
10 years ago

it seems that nature keeps a trump card up it's sleeve in case it
develops a macro-organism that is ruinous to it's own health ie a
carcinogenic entity named humanity.

bonnielou
bonnielou
10 years ago

The most serious biological attack in US history was the US government's attack on Native Americans by giving them blankets infected with smallpox!

Klaus-bud Oracle-kaczor
Klaus-bud Oracle-kaczor
10 years ago

"In the end scientific ethics and basic human good will may be the only deterrent to the proliferation of biological terrorism" Are they kidding me? In the end it is lack of ethics in scientists and their basic evil nature which has created these vile things. Their is no evidence at all anywhere that a higher education will instill ethics in people. It is always the brightest scientist who cavort with the mass murders and facilitate human cruelty and oppression. It is the scientists who now side with the government to install the drug laws guarantying tyranny at the expense of social harm for their own benefit ( to keep their status as physicians) I think that science is an inanimate concept and it can not posses ethics. Therefore the whole industrial military complex could never be counted on to hold itself to an ethical line. That would depend on individuals with courage and ethics, a rare set of traits seldom encountered in the scientists who work at weapons research

Dragan Ivanovic
Dragan Ivanovic
10 years ago

I would like to see a documentary made about biological weapons in possession of US. Fear and propaganda are used so well by Americans specifically when directed at American ideological opponents .