The Poisoned Air

Most people who brood about the horrors of war think of the bomb and forget the germs. Last week Dr. Victor H. Haas, head of the Government's Microbiological Institute, warned that 1) biological warfare is a definite possibility, and 2) the U.S. is ill-equipped at present to ward off such an attack. The nation has too few facilities even for detecting the minute organisms that an enemy might use, Dr. Haas told the College of American Pathologists in Chicago, and no organization to combat the widespread disease they might cause.

What the U.S. needs, said Dr. Haas, 41, a veteran of 19 years with the Public Health Service, is a nationwide system of germ-warfare detection centers. They would operate in much the same way as a radar network for detecting the approach of aircraft. But instead of a sky-scanning "bedspring" or "clam shell," there would be, in each likely target area, a device to force large samples of air through filters on which disease-causing organisms would be trapped. Each day's catch could be analyzed to see whether any unusual microbes had appeared. So would samples of the area's milk and water supplies.

If unusual illnesses developed, suggesting that a biological attack had been launched, germ-warfare experts would gather material from patients, alive or dead, in an effort to identify the cause of the disease. Dr. Haas frankly admitted that even with the precautions he suggested, it was still likely that the first knowledge of such an attack could come some days after it had happened, when the victims began to fall ill. However, he believes that any such epidemic would be short-lived, after casualties from the first exposure.

Several of the diseases which Dr. Haas said might be spread by saboteurs or enemy raiders cannot be effectively guarded against by inoculation--e.g., influenza, parrot fever, Q fever, tularemia, some fungus infections, botulism.* And even in cases where immunity can be given, individual inoculation is costly and cumbersome. Dr. Haas suggests that forward-looking researchers try to figure out a way of giving simultaneous protection to hundreds of people in an auditorium by forcing the immunizing agent into the air-circulating system.

* Botulin, manufactured by a common bacillus in badly preserved food, is the most deadly poison known: one ounce theoretically could kill 100 million people.

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