Ebola. These five letters have been painting a wall of fear across the world after the recent outbreak in Africa of the life threatening disease. With an average fatality rate of 52%, the Ebola virus starts with flu like symptoms and can progress to external and internal hemorrhaging and death. The virus is spread through contact with infected bodily fluids, making the potential for widespread infection to be low. However, it should never be taken lightly. In fact, Ebola has a history involving research for biological warfare. Although a Biological Weapons Convention took place in 1972, it is extremely difficult to track down efforts to create bioweapons. Unlike nuclear bombs which require a uranium mine, a nuclear power plant and so forth, biological weapons can be created in small, easy to conceal laboratories.
The concept of using Ebola as a weapon dates back to the 1970s with the Soviet Union’s biological warfare agency Biopreparat. It was an immense network of secret laboratories focusing on different types of deadly biological agents for use in a major war. The research at Biopreparat blatantly violated the terms of the Biological Weapons Convention, which prohibited bioweapons. Soviet officials denied its existence for decades. Pathogens that were under development at the time included Ebola and a hybrid of Ebola and smallpox called Ebolapox. Ebolapox could produce a form of smallpox call blackpox or hemorrhagic smallpox. In such an infection blood vessels leak, resulting in severe internal bleeding. It would be fatal combination of the high mortality rate of the Ebola virus and the highly contagious nature of smallpox. In the early 1990s Ken Alibek, an integral member of Biopreparat, defected to the United States to alert Western Intelligence about the covert program. He confirmed that the program was actually ten times greater than the West originally suspected. Alibek also claimed that development of genetically engineering weapons was still continuing, and included the use of Ebola.
At around the same time in 1992, a Japanese terrorist organization, Aum Sinrikyo, also considered the use of Ebola as a terror weapon. A group of 40 members went to Zaire, now known as Congo, under the disguise of offering medical aid to Ebola victims in an unsuccessful attempt to acquire a sample of the virus. The incentive of using this virus as a weapon is its high mortality and the lack of a cure or vaccination. It has the potential to be weaponized, but could be difficult to prepare as a weapon of mass destruction because it quickly becomes ineffective in open air.
Various experts have pointed out that Ebola is not likely to be used for bioterrorism in the near future. In order to do so, a terrorist organization would need to obtain a live host infected with the virus and transport it to a Category 4 laboratory. Such laboratories are the only suitably equipped locations to extract the virus sample, only two dozen of which exist in the world. Without such labs, the handling of the virus would likely result in the death of the handler. Even then, the process to weaponize the virus is extremely complex, involving many further processes. Ebola is not well suited to any of those processes that ensure the survival of the virus after being fired or released from a source. Furthermore, Ebola is not a very robust disease; it is sensitive to climatic conditions, requiring a very specific environment to survive including high temperatures and humidity. Therefore if the virus was transported and delivered to a Western city the sub-optimal climate would kill it off relatively quickly.
Lastly, unlike other viruses and toxins used for bioweapons, Ebola has a relatively slow transmission rate because it is not airborne. Requiring contact with infected bodily fluids makes Ebola less contagious than viruses that are airborne and is therefore easier to contain. According to experts, when proper protocol is followed, Ebola is considerably less contagious than common viruses like measles or the flu.
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