What do you think of when you read the word “bioterrorism”?
Perhaps you envision a villain — let’s say he looks like Willem Dafoe — clutching a vial of something unimaginably awful and snarling as he limps (we’re giving him a limp) toward the top of the Empire State Building. In hot pursuit is a CIA agent — let’s say he looks like Ben Affleck — running as swiftly as his Ferragamo loafers will carry him, brandishing a .44 Magnum and elbowing his way through a mass of people heading the other way.
Dr. Leslie Lobel chuckles at the notion. But the virology professor at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University is far more worried about a less cinematic scenario.
“In my view, the worst bioterrorist is nature itself, not some nut spraying stuff from the top of a building,” says the New York-born doctor and professor, a bespectacled man of average height who appears younger than his 51 years despite the stressful nature of his vocation.
And while a fiend brandishing a bag of germs is something of a far-fetched situation, the contributions of global warming and globalization to a worldwide pandemic are already being felt.
The Israeli scientist, who visited the Bay Area last month, spends a great deal of his time working in the nation the Jews could have gotten instead from the British Empire — Uganda. When it comes to horrifying viruses, Uganda is the place to go: Virologists flock there like wannabe Rockettes to Manhattan.
And yet Uganda’s status as a repository of diseases is waning. A recent outbreak of the Ebola-like Marburg hemorrhagic fever in Angola “set off alarm bells in South Africa. Marburg and Ebola are usually limited to Congo, Gabon and Uganda, right on the equator,” Lobel said.
Thanks to global warming, the virus is able to migrate north and south and thrive in nations that previously were too cold. For those of us who may simply brush this development off as Africa’s latest misfortune, Lobel notes that “a lot of horrible hemorrhagic fevers from South America” may be on their way here.
Working hand in hand with global warming is globalization. More people and animals — and Lobel notes that “the biggest reservoir for viruses is animals” — are moving around the world these days. And with warmer temperatures, transplanted viruses won’t die out as they did in the past. Lobel points out that Rift Valley fever has spread from Kenya’s Great Rift Valley to Saudi Arabia and now threatens Israel.
But wait — there’s more. Remember how Lobel said he wasn’t overly concerned with nuts spraying killer viruses off of tall buildings? Well, he’s not unconcerned.
Lobel has spent time working alongside Russian colleagues in the former Soviet Union’s top Siberian bioweapons laboratory. And yes, the scientists are barely compensated anymore and some have gone on to jobs in Iraq and Iran. And yes, it would be far easier to smuggle a vial of smallpox out of Russia than nuclear components. And yes, again, the Soviets did create bioweapons that they did not have the ability to counter.
“My Russian colleagues tested the Ebola virus. They put it in a sprayer and sprayed it off in a highly contained lab full of monkeys,” recalled Lobel.
All the monkeys were dead within a few days.
So Lobel jets between Russia, Africa and Asia, studying the world’s most fatal diseases and analyzing the antibodies present in immune persons’ systems. His lab helped to create a device that can detect the presence of certain viruses — “the American military is interested in stuff like this” — and hopes to make it smaller and more portable in the near future.
Because in the future, if the gun-toting good guys are going to have a chance, it will largely be due to the antibody-analyzing Leslie Lobels of the world.