Many bioweapon disease threats, however, lack a corresponding vaccine, and for those that do, significant challenges exist to their successful use in an emergency. Licensed vaccines are currently available for a few threats, such as anthrax and smallpox, and research is underway to develop and produce vaccines for other threats, such as tularemia, Ebola virus, and Marburg virus. The use of effective vaccines would likely protect lives and limit disease spread in a biological weapons emergency. Note that chemical weapons, such as those involving nonbiological substances such as chlorine gas, are not included.) (This index of possible threats from the CDC lists all Category A, B, and C agents. Category C agents include emerging disease agents that could be engineered for mass dissemination in the future, such as Nipah virus.

These include brucellosis, glanders, Q fever, ricin toxin, typhus fever, and other agents. These disease agents exist in nature (except for smallpox, which has been eradicated in the wild), but they could be manipulated to make them more dangerous.Ĭategory B agents are moderately easy to disseminate and result in low mortality. These are anthrax, botulism (via botulinum toxin, which is not passable from person to person), plague, smallpox, tularemia, and a collection of viruses that cause hemorrhagic fevers, such as Ebola, Marburg, Lassa, and Machupo. Category A agents are the highest priority, and these are disease agents that pose a risk to national security because they can be transmitted from person to person and/or result in high mortality, and/or have high potential to cause social disruption. Public health authorities have developed a system to prioritize biological agents according to their risk to national security. government agencies are involved in planning responses to potential biological attacks.īioweapon threats could include the deliberate release by attackers of an agent that causes one or more of a variety of different diseases. Biological attacks, however, have occurred in the past, one as recently as 2001. And indeed, the possibility of such an attack may be very remote. A biological attack by terrorists or a national power may seem more like a plot element in an action film than a realistic threat.

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