In the fall of 2001, five people died after exposure to weapons-grade spores of the Bacillus anthracis bacterium—anthrax—delivered in postal letters. The crime, which remains unsolved, brought national and international attention to the looming danger of bioterrorism and biological warfare.
Future bioterror attacks may be unavoidable, says retired United States Army Colonel David R. Franz, who has spent more than 25 years studying—and preparing medical countermeasures against—biological warfare and bioterrorism. Franz, who worked as a veterinarian before earning a doctorate in physiology, is currently the vice president and chief biological scientist at the Midwest Research Institute. He is the also the first director of the National Agricultural Biosecurity Center. In the late 1990s, Franz served as the chief inspector on three biological warfare inspections to Iraq for the United Nations Special Commission.
During your inspections of Iraq, you found bioweapons.
DF: We did. In that era, 1998, we found them. I don't think it was a high-quality program.
Were you surprised bioweapons weren't found in the recent inspections?
