Bioterror threats??

16:00 31 January 2006 NewScientist.com news service Kurt Kleiner The life sciences are developing so quickly that a watch list of dangerous pathogens and toxins is useless in fighting the threat of bioterrorism, says a new report from the US National Academy of Sciences. The report, on "next generation" bioterrorism, was requested by the US government. It concludes that intelligence agencies are too focused on specific lists of bacteria and viruses, and are not aware of emerging threats. Focusing on the list of about 60 "select agents", such as the smallpox virus and botulism toxin, might simply divert resources from newer and more dangerous threats, such as RNA interference, synthetic biology or nanotechnology. Our report "pushes back against the monomaniacal focus on bacteria, against the idea that if you can write a list of bad bacteria and control them then you're okay," says Peter A Singer, a bioethicist at the University of Toronto, Canada, who was on the NAS report committee. As examples, the report suggests it might soon be possible to engineer a virulent pathogen from scratch using DNA synthesis and that advances in gene therapy might make it possible to release an aerosol of a harmful gene that would be inhaled by victims. Listed below is the website in which to obtain more information. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8656