Biological Warfare
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Biological Warfare
The world's human population may be destroyed in the near future due to epidemics and wars using biological warfare.
Epidemics have been recorded throughout history in different parts of the world. An epidemic is generally a widespread disease that affects many individuals in a population. The proportions of an epidemic can range from one locale, or it can even turn into a global epidemic, or a pandemic.
Historical epidemics have killed large populations in the past. A well-known historical epidemic was the bubonic plague, also known as "The Black Death". The bubonic plague hit Europe in the mid-14th century. According to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, the plague killed about two-thirds of Europe's population, a whopping 34 million people. Large parts of Asia and the Middle East were also infected with this disease. The plague continued to reoccur in Europe from the fourteenth century up to the seventeenth century. The last major outbreak of the plague was the "Great Plague of London" in 1665-1666, but the plague still exists today, but only in isolated cases.
Biological warfare is another dangerous factor that has been existent for centuries. In the Middle Ages, during the bubonic plague pandemic, victims of the Black Death were used for biological attacks by flinging their corpses over walls using catapults. The last known incident of using bubonic plague corpses for biological attacks happened in 1710. At this time, Russian forces attacked the Swedes by flinging infected corpses over the city walls of Reval.
The 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention extended a ban on almost all production, storage, and transport of biological weapons. But in 1986, the U.S. government spent $42 million on research on diseases and toxins, hoping to develop strains of anthrax and other infectious diseases.
The first bioterrorism attack ever in U.S. history was in 1984. Followers of the Rajneeshee cult tried to take over a local election by infecting salad...
- Submitted by: wenersz
- Date Submitted: 05/24/2006 08:21 AM
- Category: Science
- Words: 1286
- Pages: 6
- Views: 493
- Rank: 113616