Take Russia to 'task' on bioweapons transparency.

In the run-up to his reelection, Russian president Vladimir Putin outlined 28 tasks to be undertaken by his administration, including one that commanded the development of weapons based on "genetic principles." Political pressure must be applied by governments and professional societies to ensure that there is not a modern reincarnation of the Soviet biological warfare program.

The Soviet anti-plague system: an introduction.

This article describes the composition of the Soviet Anti-plague (AP) system and presents the methodology used by the authors in their study of the AP system.

The anti-plague system and the Soviet biological warfare program.

The USSR possessed a unique national public health system that included an agency named "anti-plague system." Its mission was to protect the country from highly dangerous diseases of either natural or laboratory etiology. During the 1960s, the anti-plague system became the lead agency of a program to defend against biological warfare, codenamed Project 5. This responsibility grew and by the middle 1970s came to include undertaking tasks for the offensive biological warfare program, codenamed Ferment. This article describes the anti-plague system's activities relevant to both aspects of the Soviet Union's biological warfare program, offense and defense, and analyzes its contributions to each.

What non-proliferation policy for the Soviet anti-plague system?

This article analyzes the proliferation challenges posed by the Soviet AP system and discusses possible nonproliferation strategies to prevent these threats.

New considerations in infectious disease outbreaks: the threat of genetically modified microbes.

Genetically altered microbes are used widely in the conduct of scientific study and have facilitated the development of new medical therapies, preventive strategies, and diagnostic tools. Unfortunately, such organisms may also cause infectious disease outbreaks as a result of accidental or intentional transmission to humans. The unique microbial properties of genetically altered pathogens and the clinical symptoms exhibited by persons infected with them may impede the usual diagnostic and clinical evaluations or preventive strategies. Practicing physicians and clinicians at microbiology laboratories, who would be the first to observe such infections, must consider the broad clinical possibilities of illnesses caused by deliberately altered microorganisms and the potential difficulty in confirming a diagnosis.

A discussion of findings and their possible implications from a workshop on bioterrorism threat assessment and risk management.

In November 2001, the Monterey Institute of International Studies convened a workshop on bioterrorism threat assessment and risk management. Risk assessment practitioners from various disciplines, but without specialized knowledge of terrorism, were brought together with security and intelligence threat analysts to stimulate an exchange that could be useful to both communities. This article, prepared by a subset of the participants, comments on the workshop's findings and their implications and makes three recommendations, two short term (use of threat assessment methodologies and vulnerability analysis) and one long term (application of quantitative risk assessment and modeling), regarding the practical application of risk assessment methods to bioterrorism issues.