How Bio-terrorism Started

Bio-terrorism is defined as the use of microorganisms to create panic, terror, and havoc among the general public. The time of waging wars with conventional weapons is obsolete and taken over by biological warfare. The roots of bio-terrorism can be seen in the 14th century BC even before the arrival of Jesus Christ when Hittites inflicted the atrocities upon their enemies by sending infected rams. Still, it remains vague to differentiate between natural pandemics and biological attacks due to a lack of evidence. This is because:

• The advent of microbiology is not very old but attacks have been witnessed in the past.
• It is difficult to reach at the truth because of political gains and biases of different research institutions.
• The history might have been distorted as time runs.

We will look forward to a few events of pandemic happened in history and try to understand if those events had been a result of biological warfare or a natural evolution and transmission.

Hittite Plague:

Hittite empire stretched over modern-day Syria to Turkey and they are found to be the pioneer of bio-terrorism as per historians. They sent infected rams to weaken their enemies. Their rams were infected with tularemia which is a bacterial infection and remains a threat even today. Tularemia is also known by the name of Rabbit Fever and can be transferred to humans through rabbits and eve. In the current time, humans have a cure for this disease but if proper antibiotics not provided, it has a rate of killing almost 15% of its host.

Roman Emperor Barbarossa:

Romans have also been using biological weapons to dominate their enemies. The Roman emperor Barbarossa used to poison the wells of to kill their enemies. They used to do it by dumping the infected bodies in the wells which killed their enemies upon drinking the water from it. A famous example can be quoted from the poisonous well of Tortona where the diseased corpses of animals and humans became a source of killing a great number of enemies of Barbarossa.

Black Death:

Human history has not seen a greater pandemic than Black Death. It is a series of plague diseases that made people suffer over 150 years. Scientists from various research centers in the world believe that this Plague originated in China about 2000 years ago which peaked in Europe amidst 1347 to 1351 killing almost 30% to 60% population of Europe. It remains a mystery whether it was an engineered weapon or a natural plague. However, the genetic sequence of The Plague was reused again in history by many scientists to rebuild a plague to use it as a bio-weapon in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Smallpox:

Though Smallpox existed in Europe, it was used as a biological weapon to kill the Native Americans during the colonial era. It is an open secret that colonialists distributed contaminated blankets among the natives to disease them. This is one of the scariest realities in the history of America where millions of people were deliberately killed by diseasing them. Smallpox caused blindness, disfiguring scars, and death to the indigenous Americans.