No Place For Experiments
 

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...1,380692.story

Los Angeles Times
Dec 24, 2003

EDITORIAL

No Place for an Experiment

Soldiers have a special obligation to stay fit and ready to defend their nation. Even so, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan was right to recognize that military fitness does not extend to a requirement that all soldiers get controversial anthrax vaccinations.

Sullivan's ruling Monday responded to a lawsuit filed by six unidentified service members and civilian contractors contending that the series of six vaccine injections can cause health risks ranging from sterility to cardiac arrest and immune disorders.

The evidence of the vaccine's harmfulness is, in fact, skimpy and mostly anecdotal. It rests largely on a 2002 report by the General Accounting Office in which some troops spoke of extreme fatigue, joint pain and chronic memory loss after receiving anthrax shots. Doctors have not, however, proved that the vaccine caused those symptoms.

What's known hardly amounts to smoking-gun evidence against a drug administered to more than 900,000 service members in recent years. Even thinner, however, is the evidence that terrorists are imminently willing and able to use anthrax as a weapon of war. It is slow-acting and just as likely to drift on the wind back to the attackers.

The anecdotal nature of the evidence against the vaccine does call for more research. The Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, reported four years ago that the vaccine's effect on humans had been poorly studied. And though the Pentagon's Gen. Richard Myers on Tuesday denied that the drug was experimental, the Food and Drug Administration has not formally approved the six-shot regimen against inhalational anthrax, the serious form of the disease that results from breathing anthrax spores.

Biological weapons are a potential national security risk. One of Osama bin Laden's key biographers, Yossef Bodansky, insists that the Al Qaeda leader has acquired Ebola and salmonella viruses from Russia, botulinum toxin and equipment for its production from the Czech Republic and anthrax from North Korea.

There is more that government can do to protect against bioweapons. At home, there is great room for improvement in systems for tracking how samples of anthrax ? as well as other deadly pathogens like Ebola ? move through U.S. laboratories. Enforcement and monitoring muscle should be added to the Biological Weapons Convention, a toothless 1972 treaty that ? in name but not in deed ? bans the development, production and stockpiling of biological weapons.

The key to winning future battles against bioterrors lies in carefully weighing the potential benefits and risks of each tactic. It's on this scale that the anthrax vaccine fails. There is no clear and present reason to require soldiers to submit to a vaccine that should first be studied harder.