Will ISIS resort to bubonic plague bioweapons?

The Sun reports that University of Texas researchers are working to develop vaccines and other treatments to counter bubonic plague attacks by terrorist organizations.

Today the disease – which has a 90 to 100 per cent mortality rate – has been classed by the World Health Organisation as a “re-emerging human pathogen”.

Dr Ashok Chopra, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Texas, is leading studies he hopes will develop a vaccine to counter all three strains.

He told The Sun Online: “We are specifically looking at pneumonic plague because the mortality rate associated with pneumonic plague is very high – almost 100 percent.”

Bubonic plague is the most commonly recognised strain of the disease – but the pnuemonic variant is much more virulent, and unlike bubonic, is spread via airborne particles.

“If terrorists use those organisms – they could utilise the bacteria. It could lead to mass deaths in a very short period of time. It would spread very, very quickly.

“Think about the bubonic plague in Europe in the 13th, 14th century. One third of the population was wiped out because of infection. That’s the typical scenario that you should think of.

“At the time it started with the bubonic plague and then it went to the pnuemonic plague and one third of the population died so the consequences could be enormous.”

This is bad news, too:

Studies have since revealed the USSR focused on developing “aerosolized” forms of the disease – thereby removing the need for it to be transmitted via infected fleas [Yersinia pestis - D.S.] or animals.

Work on this continued into the 1990s at least.

I pointed out last year that weaponizing the plague could be in the cards. Back in 1988-89 I wrote a 105,000-word novel about an Iranian plot to infiltrate a weaponized, extremely lethal form of Y. pestis into the United States, aiming to kill millions of Americans. The plotters were not the Khomeinist government, but the dwindling number of Iranian communists who were supported from Moscow by a small, rogue element of the Soviet general staff. It is set in the late 1980s, during Gorbachev's tenure as General Secretary.

You can read the first section of the third chapter. Click here and page down a little (Blogger's page-jump coding is pathetic, sorry).