A unique international network used by medical experts in Russia and the United States could soon play a role in helping nab violators of international weapons treaties.
The Cooperative Disease Monitoring Project is linking medical staffs in three New Mexico hospitals with physicians in a medical facility near a former Russian nuclear-weapons lab to share their findings on the spread of Hepatitis C.
But just as interesting as the electronic collaboration is its potential future application: a tool for ferreting out countries that develop toxic chemical weapons in violation of international law.
The monitoring project brings together two countries that often oppose each other on the issue of weapons control. But where weapons treaties often take on the aura of a high-stakes chess match, the spread of disease is not measured in terms of winners and losers. The medical communities in the United States and Russia know cooperation is essential in understanding –- and eventually combating — the threat of Hepatitis C.
The virus has infected roughly 3 percent of the world’s population according to the World Health Organization, and the Centers for Disease Control estimates that 3.9 million people in the United States carry the disease. Many who carry the disease don’t realize they are infected.
“Hepatitis C is apolitical,” noted Alan Zelicoff, director of the Nonproliferation Initiatives Department at Sandia National Laboratory. “It’s a very bad health problem in both countries, and you have epidemiologists in both countries meeting to compare notes. It’s the best of science.”
The monitoring project is being built upon a foundation of epidemiological evidence. Firsthand accounts of individual Hepatitis C cases are gathered and studied as a collection, which paints a picture of the spread of the disease. Raw data, which will be posted to a Web site accessible to the medical staffs at all the connected facilities, will include descriptions of symptoms and behaviors that may have led to infection. “[The Web site] will be like an electronic white board,” explained Zelicoff, an immunologist and physicist.
By linking the medical teams, Zelicoff believes it will create a “transparency regime,” a behind-the-scenes organization with no political agenda that can tell the true story of suspicious, sudden illnesses — the kind of news that governments might work to cover up.
Zelicoff recalls the outbreak of anthrax in the Russian province of Sverdlovsk in 1979. Doctors from around the world attending a conference in Sverdlovsk were alarmed by news from local physicians: Numerous residents of the province were stricken by a pulmonary illness so severe that it caused 64 deaths in a two-week period. The illness turned out to be anthrax, and the Soviet government blamed the outbreak –- for which the official death toll is still not known –- on contaminated meat.
But studies by pathologists and other researchers told a different story. The area of the outbreak was downwind from a biological-weapons lab in Sverdlovsk. A look at weather data for the period preceding the outbreak revealed that high winds were blowing from the lab to the area in Sverdlovsk where the victims died.
“This shows that epidemiology is an extremely powerful tool in determining when someone violates a treaty,” Zelicoff said.
In the same way, Zelicoff hopes the monitoring project will add teeth to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. This 1972 agreement stipulates that the signatories will not use biological agents, such as anthrax, to make weapons of mass destruction and that nations will cooperate in the process of inspections. Nevertheless, the doctrine governs a nation’s intent to use biological agents, not the possession of them. And this means weapons inspectors have no real way of monitoring compliance.
That’s in part because biological toxins are playing a bigger role in the treatment of various medical conditions. Smaller, diluted forms of harmful substances, like belladonna and botulism toxin, are used to treat ailments ranging from teething to wrinkle reduction. To get to the refined tincture, a scientist must first possess the very same thing a biological weapons-maker must have: A large quantity of the impure toxin.
“This is a squishy problem because it’s very hard to distinguish between impure and pure intentions,” noted Zelicoff, who is a technical adviser to the US delegation on upgrading the weapons convention.
Projects like Zelicoff’s, or ProMED, can silently fill in the gaps. ProMED, or Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases, was started in 1993 by the Federation of American Scientists to create a network of physicians around the globe to track the spread of infectious disease as a way of monitoring biological-weapons treaty compliance.
What makes this tie valid is that countries already share information about the history of infectious disease in a population, according to Dorothy Preslar, director of ProMED and Animal Health/Emerging Animal Diseases (AHEAD).
“If you know a country has known strains of A,B, and C of a disease and then suddenly see D or E, then it is a sign of something we need to monitor,” Preslar explained.
Networks such as ProMED are only effective if there are a number of participants. Preslar points to the fact that ProMED’s email network goes to 150 countries as a sign of its utility.
But there is more work to be done. Zelicoff hopes his project will augment the efforts of ProMED and do it one better: Instead of having closed mail lists and databases, Zelicoff wants the Cooperative Disease Monitoring Project to use the Web and multicast technologies to provide dynamic data on outbreaks so violations can be pinpointed sooner.
