Biological Threats

Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, for initiating this extremely important debate and being kind enough to let me have sight of that excellent research paper from Mr Julian Elderfield. Without that, I would not have been able to speak in this debate; such is the paucity of my knowledge of these matters. There are important broader considerations, many of which I engage with regularly, so I decided that it was important to hear what was said today.

It seems that the concerns on this issue fall into three broad categories: public information, international co-operation and regulation. In the context of the report by the Defence Select Committee in the other place on cybersecurity, we heard yesterday from General Jonathan Shaw, former head of cybersecurity at the MoD, about the lack of preparedness. He made the point that one of the greatest weaknesses in the system is the lack of awareness of the public, enterprise and companies as to what can happen to the infrastructure around us and of the potential breakdown of day-to-day technological systems on which we all rely. He called for a public awareness campaign similar to the HIV/AIDS campaigns of the 1980s, when every household in the country received a leaflet informing them of the background and their options in terms of behaviour change and so on. That is the extent to which he considered public information to be critical.

Although it is a very different threat, that could equally apply to the threat from biological warfare, which may potentially be more serious than cyberwarfare in the context both of an indiscriminate bioterrorist attack could affect densely populated areas, and of serious leaks from laboratories that could cause multiple fatalities. There would then be questions of identifying what created the emergency and dealing with the fall-out from it. The awareness and preparedness of the emergency services was touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Harris. He is a great expert on that so I will not particularly dwell on it, but it will be critical to how the emergency is dealt with. For example, identifying the nature of the attack would itself be a challenge, as well as dealing with potential mass casualties.

The aftermath of the sarin attack on the Tokyo underground in 1995 is instructive. That was the most serious attack on the Japanese mainland since World War Two. It killed 13 people, seriously injured 50 and created temporary problems with vision for about 1,000 people. Immediately after the attack, ambulances transported nearly 700 patients and hospitals saw nearly 5,000 patients who got there by one means or another. Most of those reporting to hospital were the worried well—in other words, people who thought that they might have been affected. As it turned out, many of them were not but they were a drain on hospital facilities in an emergency.

Witnesses reported afterwards that subway entrances resembled battlefields. In many cases, the injured simply lay on the ground, many with breathing difficulties. Many of those affected by sarin went to work that morning despite their symptoms, most of them not realising that they had been exposed to it. Most victims who sought medical treatment as the symptoms worsened got the information that led them to report to hospital via news broadcasts, so there was a considerable lag between the incident itself and the information on what had happened and what people had to do about it if they were affected.

In the aftermath, emergency services were criticised for their handling of the attack. For example, the Tokyo subway authority failed to halt several trains despite reports of passenger injury and the platforms were inundated. Sarin poisoning was not well known at the time, and many hospitals only received information on diagnosis and treatment because a single professor at Shinshu University’s school of medicine happened to see reports on television. He had experience of treating sarin poisoning after a very small incident, recognised the symptoms and had information on diagnosis and treatment. He then led a team who sent the information to hospitals throughout Tokyo via fax machine.

That was some considerable time ago, although frankly 17 years is not that long. Technology has moved on and, as the noble Lord, Lord Harris, said, after the attacks of 7/7 here in the UK, we have put into place a significant number of protocols to ensure that a joined-up response can be effected in the event of a major emergency. The question still arises of how quickly we can identify the cause, given the plethora of different types of pathogens that can be used and, indeed, the natural variants that can exist. Another question is whether we have sufficient antidotes to treat the victims.

Information campaigns may also be useful in deciding what not to do. In the Tokyo attack, significant numbers of people were exposed to sarin only because they helped others who had been directly exposed. Among those passengers on other trains were subway workers and health workers, who immediately set aside everything else and got stuck in to helping people. We know from this that even basic guidance such as where to look for information would itself be helpful.

The second principle to deal with is international co-operation. Before I move to the UN framework, it is worth commenting that—according to today’s New York Times—the first General Assembly of the United Nations was convened in London for its first meeting on this date in 1946. What a happy day it is for our country.

Multilateral diplomacy aims to regulate biotechnology and to prevent bioweapons. This is, of course, of limited use when it comes to terrorists, and that is the problem. Traditional diplomacy on its own is not enough. As we know from bitter experience, international law is meaningless to terrorists. Given that the Biological Weapons Convention is nearly universally ratified— 165 states have ratified it and 12 have signed it—the treaty offers a sound platform for developing further policy in this area. We need to build on the BWC and not let unilateral measures undermine the treaty. One method of strengthening the BWC is to institute greater confidence-building measures in the regular meetings which take place in between the quinquennial reviews, the last of which took place in 2011.

The lack of enforcement and verification of the BWC is a further problem, but it does not invalidate the treaty. It has contributed to the national policy development and is therefore a key source of policy diffusion and information sharing. While we would want to see a global verification regime, I suggest that while the US continues to be an obstacle we should not hold out too much hope and should do what we did with the ICC, when partners of the US moved forward without that particular ally, while encouraging it to participate from afar.

We also need to recognise certain limitations of global Governance. We are not going to eliminate bioweapons research; major powers will always want to create a security margin for themselves by doing defensive research to develop bioweapons in order to understand how they work and how they may be able to develop measures to fight them if they are released by enemies. There will always be a suspicion that other countries’ defensive research could potentially be used for offensive purposes, but it is our responsibility to our citizens to continue to do that research.

Given the boundaries between pure and applied research, defensive and offensive, civilian and military uses are unavoidably blurred. It is also important to better integrate biosecurity considerations into current public policy on biotechnology, nanotechnology and synthetic biology. I suspect that this is largely missing from current policy initiatives in these areas, not least within the European Union framework. In responding, is my noble friend able to tell us what work is ongoing within the EU to advance this?

I conclude by turning briefly to regulation. From the literature it appears that more could be done to increase security in the institutions that deal with these matters. Better controls are required. Can the Minister tell us in summing up what requirements are put on laboratories in the UK to conform to standards, as well as international bodies that engage in this work, particularly those which sub-contract to research laboratories abroad?