PNAS Publishes Bio-Terrorism Paper

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has decided to publish a paper that the Department of Health and Human Services had asked to be withheld. The paper is a mathematical model of a terrorism scenario where botulinum toxin is released into the milk supply. The paper is accompanied by a commentary by Bruce Alberts, the president of the National Academy of Sciences, explaining why they chose to publish the paper. (I briefly blogged about this previously.)

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Alberts makes two arguments supporting the publication of terrorism-related articles in the open scientific literature. The first is that the information becomes available to a wide variety of scientists who can criticize and build on the findings, potentially leading to new and better ideas that would not otherwise be predicted. The second is that people should be aware of real dangers. "If the types of calcuations and analyses in the Wein and Liu article are carried out only by government contractors in secrecy, not only are the many actors in the U.S. system who need to be alerted unlikely to be well informed, but also the federal government itself may become misled--either greatly overestimating or underestimating the seriousness of a particular danger relative to other concerns." Apparently due to its wide circulation in preprint form, some are already beginning to challenge aspects of the paper.

The committe that decided to publish the paper looked at a number of criteria in considering the issue. For a given pathogen, does the paper:

1. Show how to makea vaccine ineffective?
2. Give resistance to therapeutics?
3. Enhance virulence?
4. Increase transmissibility?
5. Alter the host range?
6. Allow evasion of detection?
7. Enable weaponization?

They determined that this paper did none of these things, and that all of the critical information is easily obtainable on the internet.

The paper is available for free. Here is the abstract:

We developed a mathematical model of a cows-to-consumers supply chain associated with a single milk-processing facility that is the victim of a deliberate release of botulinum toxin. Because centralized storage and processing lead to substantial dilution of the toxin, a minimum amount of toxin is required for the release to do damage. Irreducible uncertainties regarding the dose-response curve prevent us from quantifying the minimum effective release. However, if terrorists can obtain enough toxin, and this may well be possible, then rapid distribution and consumption result in several hundred thousand poisoned individuals if detection from early symptomatics is not timely. Timely and specific in-process testing has the potential to eliminate the threat of this scenario at a cost of <1 cent per gallon and should be pursued aggressively. Investigation of improving the toxin inactivation rate of heat pasteurization without sacrificing taste or nutrition is warranted.

The Alberts commentary is available here, but may require a subscription at this time.