The document provides an extensive overview of the historical use of insects in bioterrorism, covering various campaigns from prehistoric times to modern warfare, including World War II and contemporary conflicts. It categorizes insects as weapons, agents of agroterrorism, and disease vectors, detailing significant historical events and their impact on public health. The document also discusses the current bioterrorism threat landscape, biosecurity measures, and the situation in India regarding preparedness against such threats.

2. INSECT BASED
BIOTERRORISM:
AN OVERVIEW

4. What is Bioterrorism???
According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and
Prevention (2008), Bioterrorism is the deliberate release
of viruses, bacteria, toxins or other harmful agents to
cause illness or death in people, animals, or plants.
• Biocrime
• Biological warfare
• Biological weapons
• Food terrorism

5. Classification of bioterrorism
agents
Class A
 Easily disseminated
 High mortality rates
 Major public health impact
 Public panic and social disruption
Class B
 Moderately easy to disseminate
 Low mortality rates
Class C
 Emerging pathogens
 Could be engineered for mass dissemination in
the future

6. INTRODUCTION
• The use of insects as weapons of war, tools of terrorism, and
instruments of torture extends from the opportunism of prehistorical
assaults to the calculated tactics of modern, asymmetric conflicts.
Insects are used to:
• Involve the infliction of pain
• Cause direct damage to agriculture
• Cause disease acting as vector of microbes

7. PREHISTORICAL TACTICS
• The earliest use of insects was in the Upper Paleolithic period
• Tossing a nest of bees, hornets, wasps, or ants (Neufeld 1980)
• The Tiv people used large, specially crafted horns filled with
bees
• The San bushmen extracted a potent poison from the larvae and
pupae of chrysomelid beetles (Diamphidia nigroornata and D.
vittatipennis) found in the soil beneath corkwood trees
(Lockwood 2009)

8. ANCIENT HISTORY: INFLICTING SUFFERING
 Hornets were evidently used to knock out opponents
 The plagues of Egypt described in Exodus have been interpreted as biting
midges and locust-induced famine inflicted great suffering on the
Egyptians (Wotton 2007)
 Middle Eastern cultures used pottery hives as “bee grenades”
 Pederin a toxin secreted by Paederus beetles (Mayor , 2003)
 Siberian tribes used flies for torture and execution

9.  The Hatrians prepared for the Roman assault battle referred to “poisonous
flying insects”
 Romans made extensive use of bees as catapult payloads in other siege
(Ambrose 1974)
 Romans cornered the Pontic army and laid siege, but the Romans were
routed when they tried to bore beneath the city walls and Mithridates’ troops
released bees into the tunnels
The Roman Empire: Weaponization of Stinging Arthropods

10. Fleas and Collateral Casualties
Mongols sieged city of kaffa and this continued for three years, until the
Mongol camp was devastated by bubonic plague
 There was role of insects in this outbreak
 Enough infected fleas remained within the clothing of the dead Mongols to
spread the bacteria among the city’s rats, dogs, cats and humans
(Lockwood 2009)
 By 1350, the resulting pandemic stretched across Europe, killing 25 million
people more than one-quarter of the continent’s population

11. Insect-Borne Disease in the Napoleonic Wars
 In 1799, the Ottoman Empire declared war on France, prompting Napoleon Bonaparte to
invade Syria with 13,000 troops
 As Napoleon’s flea-infested troops laid siege at Acre, disease increased in prevalence
and Napoleon accepted defeat
 In 1812, Napoleon amassed 4,50,000 soldiers for invasion of Russia with ultimate
objective of taking India
The Grand Army become infested with lice-and infected with typhus. French lost 80,000
soldiers to disease within one month
 Napoleon returned home having lost more than 2,00,000 men to disease
(Peterson 2008)

12. Insect-Borne Disease in the U.S. Civil War
 In 1862, 4,88,000 soldiers who perished in civil war, in which the two-thirds
died of disease
“I am fighting, sir, every day! Is it nothing that I compel the enemy to inhabit the
swamps, like frogs, and lessen their strength every hour, without firing a shot?”
(Steiner 1968)
More than 20,000 union army men were hospitalized due to malaria
Union army finally had to withdraw their forces after realizing that their opponents
had used entomological weapon

13. Insects as Instruments of Torture
In 18th century Apache Indians used ants to cause painful death
Victims had honey smeared on their body before being staked over anthills
 Torture chamber consisting of a 7-m-deep pit covered with an iron grill and
stocked with assassin bugs (Reduviidae) and sheep ticks (Dermacentor
marginatus)
 “Masses of flesh had been gnawed off [the prisoners’] bones” after two months in
the pit (Maclean 1959)

14. THE WORLD WARS: World War I
 Beginning in 1914, the Eastern Front became a worst-case scenario for typhus
(Holmes 2001)
 By november 1914, Louse-borne typhus began to spread among the refugees
and the Serbian army
 Russia, however, was not spared from the epidemic, from 1917 to 1922, there
were at least 20 million cases leaving 3 to 10 million dead
 The Western Front had learned from the Crimean War that disease was deadlier
than bombs or bullets, with three-quarters of the casualties resulting from typhus
(Tschanz 2008)

15. World War I
 Strategic quarantine by limiting the exchange of troops with the Eastern Front
 The British Sanitary Units adopted dry-cleaning methods
 Although typhus was kept under control, trench fever emerged in France and
Belgium, afflicting 800,000 men with few fatalities
 “passive” form of entomological warfare was used throughout twentieth
century
(Lockwood 2009)

16. World War II: The Japanese
 Shiro ishii – trained Doctor, microbiologist and military officer
 When Russian infiltrators were caught with vials of pathogenic bacteria
 The newly designated Unit 731 studied the greatest potential of insects as a weapons
 Unit 731 developed the Uji bomb a ceramic shell casing with a small explosive charge
that released its 10-liter payload over a target
(Barenblatt 2004)
 Fleas were initially reared on prisoners, but mass production involved thousands of
incubators stocked with rodents. Unit 731 soon had the capacity to produce 45 kg of
fleas every 3 to 4 months, with the potential for more than 500 million fleas per year

17. World War II: The Japanese
After the success of Ishii’s experiments on humans, the program grew to 15,000
scientists working at Pingfan as well as
1. Anda Station (Field test delivery methods on human targets)
2. Detachment 100 (Tick-borne piroplasmosis against horses)
3. Unit Ei 1644 ( For mass-producing fleas and typhus infested lice)
4. Unit 673 (Epidemic hemorrhagic fever) (Barenblatt 2004)
The Japanese discovered that fleas could be released directly from low-flying
aircraft using specialized sprayers

18. World War II: The Japanese
 Unit 731 conducted entomological warfare causing at least 1,00,000 casualties
 The Japanese continued efforts to contaminate Chinese water supplies with
cholera but had little success
 The latter device was divided in a section packed with a slurry of bacteria and a
compartment loaded with house flies (Musca domestica)
Approximately 60,000 of the refugees died of cholera, and villages were
infected as far as in area of 200 km (Barenblatt 2004)

19. World War II: European Developments
 Mass rearing and release systems for the Colorado potato beetle, a pest that had
been accidentally introduced into Europe (Grubinger 2008)
 Germans initiated an insecticide development program (Clarke 1968)
 German espionage revealed that the Americans had delivered thousands of
Colorado potato beetles to the British
 In response of that Germany’s Colorado Potato Beetle Research Institute was
converted into facilities for weaponizing insects
 Between 1941 and 1944, at least 15 species of insects were used in
bioterrorism

20. World War II: European Developments
 The Germans determined that 20 to 40 million beetles were needed to
inflict serious damage on England’s potato crop
 Total of 54,000 beetles, of which only 154 were recovered a result that
the Germans interpreted to mean that the insects were dispersing widely
(Garrett 1996)
 British naturalist recounted that cardboard box-bombs filled with 50 to
100 beetles were dropped on the Isle of Wight

21. World War II: The United States, Great Britain, and
Canada
 British warned USA that Germans would be prepared to introduce an
epidemic of yellow fever
 “Studies be made to determine whether mosquitoes can be infected with
several diseases simultaneously ”
 Canadians spreading yellow fever using infected Aedes aegypti
 British conducted preliminary work on the use of house flies to vector
Salmonella and focused on weaponizing anthrax
(Regis 1999)

22. World War II: The United States, Great Britain, and
Canada
 U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) collaborated with Canadian
entomological warfare experts to dislodge the Nazi force
 The logistical challenges of mass-producing, contaminating, and releasing
flies
(OSS) developed a synthetic version with a chemical attractant to draw
the insects to bacterially coated bait
When typhus threatened American troops after they landed in Naples, a lice
control program was initiated
 Within a few months, the U.S. army dusted more than 3 million people with
127 tons of DDT and suppressed the incipient epidemic
(Schultz 1992)

23. Operation Big Itch
 Operation Big Itch was a September 1954 series of tests at Dugway Ground in
Utah
 The fleas were loaded into two types of munitions and dropped from the air. The
E14 bomb and E23 bomb, which could be clustered into the E86 cluster bomb
and E77 bomb, respectively
 The E14 was designed to hold 1,00,000 fleas and the E23 was designed to hold
2,00,000 fleas but the E23 failed in over half of the preliminary Big Itch tests
 Fleas survive the drop from an airplane but they also soon attached themselves
to hosts
(Hay 1999)

24. The Korean bioterrorism War
 Korean War began on June 25, 1950
 In 1952, North Korea officially alleged to the United Nations that the U.S.
Military had been “systematically scattering large quantities of bacteria-carrying
insects (Croddy 2002)
 China expanded the accusations – one week 68 airdrops of contaminated
insects (Endicott and Hagerman 1998)
 Massive report documenting the use of 14 different arthropods, infected with
at least eight different pathogens (ISC 1952)

25. International Scientific Commission (ISC) report on bioterrorism
1.Eye witnesses reported insects falling from American planes
2. Large numbers of springtails in a cement stadium
3.Unusual times, e.g., migratory locusts in mid-March
4. Americans’ capacity to breed selectively for cold tolerance

26. The Vietnam War
The three major entomological warfare tactics were used
1. First, insect borne disease was pursued by USA in south-east Asia
2. Second, the North Vietnamese accused the Americans of releasing insects to
destroy rice and fruit trees (Cookson and Nottingham 1969)
3. Third, both sides sought to use stinging insects
a) There were also reports of the North Vietnamese training bees to attack
anyone wearing an American uniform
b) Americans considered using pheromones to “mark target individuals and
then release bees to attack them” (Ambrose 1974)

27. The U.S.-Cuban Conflict
• The primary target was to be Cuba’s sugarcane crop, and the primary agent was
the sugarcane leafhopper, Perkinsiella vitiensis, which transmits the virus that
causes Fiji disease
• Rice hoja blanca virus, a plant hopper-borne pathogen studied at Fort Detrick
(Whitby 2002)
•A five-month epidemic of dengue fever, a mosquito-borne disease, resulted in
3,44,203 cases and 158 deaths (Kouri et al 1986)

28. 28
MODERN, ASYMMETRICAL WARFARE: Contemporary Torture
 First half of the twentieth century, Soviet jailers used bed bugs, Cimex
lectularius, as instruments of torture in the gulags (Solzhenitsyn 1974)
 In modern China, prisoners have been stripped and handcuffed to poles during
the summer at dusk or dawn in areas with high densities of mosquitoes
 U.S. interrogators used insects as a form of psychological torture on an
entomophobic captive (MacAskill 2009)

29. Entomological terrorism can be organized into 3 major categories:
1. Insects as weapons of direct attacks
2. Agents of agroterrorism
3. Disease vectors

30. 1. Direct attacks
 Military personnel will have natural exposures to biting, stinging, or toxic
insects
One documented threat to military personnel that could be used in direct
attack is paederus beetle
 Though they are relatively free of vector-borne disease
Intense pain and temporary blindness have been reported when pederin is
introduced to the eyes
(Derek et al 2010)

31. 2. AGROTERRORISM
 The Medflies species are found in Hawaii, but are not established on the
US mainland
In 1989, an ecoterrorist group known as the “Breeders” threatened to
release Medflies in California if the state did not stop its pesticide spraying
program
In 1990 USA spent 6.5 million dollar on research to use caterpillar as
biological weapon against crops
(Derek et al 2010)

32. Agroterrorism of exotic pests

33. 3. DISEASE VECTORS: Rift valley fever (RVF)
 Rift Valley fever is an excellent example of a disease that would require little
effort to deliver to the United States
 Occurs in various regions of sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar
 Numerous mosquito species transmit the virus that causes RVF
 High attack rates in livestock, with 30% mortality and abortion rates
approaching 100%.
(Derek et al 2010)

34. 3. Disease vectors
(Derek et al 2010)

35. Contemporary Terrorism
 Agricultural terrorism has been a concern since the early 1960s, when the
USDA warned of the nation’s vulnerability to the Mediterranean fruit fly (Ceratitis
capitata), khapra beetle (Trogoderma granarium), Asiatic rice borer (Chilo
suppressalis), silver “Y” moth (Autographa gamma), Sunn pest (Eurygaster
integriceps), dura stem borer (Sesamia cretica), and several species of potato
weevils (Lockwood 2009)
 1991 arrival of the sweet potato whitefly (Bemisia tabaci ), caused $300 million
damage to California Agriculture
 The livestock industry is also a viable target according to a 2003 report of the
National Research Council (NRC)
 The NRC report also included the possibility of insect-borne diseases as
terrorist weapons

36. Contemporary Terrorism
 Entomological terrorism using genetically modified vectors or insect-borne
pathogens is a possible tactic
 Research at Fort Detrick pursued the development of insect strains with
insecticide resistance and with enhanced biting activity
 Mosquitoes could be genetically engineered to transmit HIV (Lockwood 2009)
 Whitefly-transmitted plant virus could be genetically modified to produce
botulinum toxin so that vast areas of corn would be rendered deadly
(MacKenzie 1999)

37. ARE WE READY?

38. Biosecurity
 A comprehensive approach, main aim is necessary to minimize the risk of
harm caused by non native to agriculture, the economy, the environment,
and human health
Biosecurity is therefore the sum of risk management practices in defense
against biological threats. (NASDA 2001)
 Prevent harm from both intentional and unintentional introductions of
organisms
Biosecurity measures
 Prevention
 Early detection
 Rapid alert and response

39. India’s Biosecurity regulations
 India’s Agriculture Biosecurity Bill tabled in the lower house of
Parliament in year 2013 is still pending
 The Bill hopes to establish an Agricultural Biosecurity Authority of
India
 The bill is expected to replace the century-old Destructive Insects and
Pests Act (DIPA) and the Livestock Importation Act. A Plant Quarantine
Order was passed in 1962 under the DIPA to attain better proficiency in
quarantining the inflow of harmful insects and plants
 The National Farmers Commission subsequently made recommendations
for setting up a centralised National Agricultural Biosecurity System

40. Bioterrorism threat to India and our Bioterrorism Preparedness
 There are no confirmed incidents of bioterrorism attack in India
Some of suspected attacks are as follows:
1994, Pneumonic plague attack in Surat
1996, Dengue hemorrhagic fever attack in Delhi
1999, Anthrax attack in Midnapore
2001, the Mystery encephalitis attack in Siliguri.
 But in India, we still have no such dedicated law, India’s has so far, put efforts
mainly via NDMA, NDRF and DRDO
 Our country lacks an effective public health system and that is why, any event of
bioterrorism can create havoc in the country

41. FUTURE ISSUES
 Continued archaeological research
 Japanese biological warfare program of World War II have yet to be
revealed
 The secrecy surrounding entomological weapons by the United States
and other nations in the 1950s and 1960s
 The complexity of the politics and history during the Cold War

42. CONCLUSIONS
For Millennia insects were used as “found” weapons as tactical
arms.
In recent times sociopolitical changes have put insects back into
the realm of human conflict
Factors like nationalism, racism, and economics served to justify
use of insects as weapons
“six-legged” cutters of primitively armed insects being used as
terrorists, waging a war against modern society.