Information Related to "An Overview of Conditions Around the World - Mar/Apr 2001"

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The specter of bioterrorism

According to Foreign Affairs magazine, several nations besides the United States possess biological weapons: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, China, North Korea, Russia, Israel, Taiwan and possibly Sudan, India, Pakistan and Kazakhstan. Potentially more serious is that militant political groups around the world seek either to develop or buy biological weapons for possible terrorist use.

Smallpox would be particularly deadly as a weapon in the bioterrorism arsenal. It kills one in three of its victims and blinds and disfigures many others. In 1980 the disease was declared extinct by the World Heath Organization. Yet the virus lives on, legitimately, in hundreds of vials stored in heavily secured laboratories in Russia and America.

Read the full article at www.gnmagazine.org/issues/gn33/worldnewtrends33.htm