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from: Behind in the biowar by Katherine McIntire Peters
source: Government Executive, 1 December 2001
via: HighBeam™ Research

History's deadliest weapons are making a comeback, and the public health system is far from ready to deal with them.

When a group of Mongol invaders besieged a Genoese trading colony on the Black Sea in 1346, they devised an ingenious way to clear the city.

They lobbed the corpses of plague victims over the city walls, unleashing destruction far beyond the range of their catapults. The Genoese lucky enough to escape by sea to Sicily brought the deadly plague bacteria with them. Before the decade ended, the Black Death, which had already ravaged China and the Middle East, swept across Europe, killing as much as half the population.

When historians look back on the emergence of inhalation anthrax as a weapon in the fall of 2001, they won't see an anomaly, but rather the continuation of a pattern. The history of warfare and the history of disease are intertwined. A century after the Black Death ravaged Europe, smallpox, spread innocently at first but later with deliberation, played a pivotal role in the European conquest of the New World, killing 80 percent of the indigenous population in some areas.