Global Anthrax Stocks Need Tighter Control

Oct. 26 -- Sweeping anti-terror legislation signed into law by President Bush today may help curb the spread of biological weapons to potential terrorists in the United States, but experts fear the availability of materials like anthrax elsewhere in the world pose serious risks.

They say the new laws will do little to prevent potential terrorists from obtaining microbiological materials like anthrax and plague — collected and traded by germ banks for legitimate research purposes — in many other countries around the globe where there aren't such stringent laws.

The bill raises penalties to up to 10 years in prison for the unregulated transfers of deadly biological agents, and criminalizes the possession of such substances by persons not registered with the government.

The New York Post reported this week 1999 court testimony from an Osama bin Laden associate that bin Laden elements purchased anthrax through the mail from a lab in Eastern Europe.

"This is not the sort of thing that you can close off in the United States and allow to happen in other countries," says Jason Pate is a senior research associate with the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey.

Prevalent Research

In more than two-dozen countries, public and private "culture collection" sites or "germ banks" store and distribute various anthrax strains to scientists, researchers and other organizations.

The sites, in countries as diverse as Brazil, Iran and the United Kingdom, sell, trade or give away the anthrax strains to other entities based upon their particular national laws.

The U.S. government for years has considered such sites — which are beneficial for scientific and medical research — a potential source of material for would-be terrorists.

Biological agents, like anthrax, "are readily available in the natural environment and from culture collections in the industrialized and in some developing nations," said a 1999 Defense Department report.