Microbiologist Favors Flyover Bans

By CHUCK SCHOFFNER Associated Press Writer

September 21, 2001, 6:51 AM EDT

DES MOINES, Iowa -- The University of Michigan will no longer allow aircraft to fly over its 107,000-seat stadium during football games. Neither will Penn State, Clemson and Alabama.

University of Iowa microbiologist Mary Gilchrist approves. She is director of the Iowa Hygienic Laboratory, part of a national network that deals with bioterrorism threats.

One of her nightmare scenarios is a small plane buzzing a stadium and unleashing a biological agent that could infect tens of thousands of people at once.

"I would try to avoid letting any airplanes anywhere near one of those facilities," Gilchrist said. "To avoid them dropping an explosive, to avoid them flying into a crowd and, perhaps third, to avoid them from dropping an organism."

Gilchrist is credited with getting the National Laboratory Network for Bioterrorism Detection established. It links public health officials from around the country with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and other federal agencies.

Gilchrist said she watched a major league baseball game the other night and was relieved the crowd was small.

"I'm so glad it was nearly empty," she said. "To mark our return to normalcy with some kind of attack, that would have been devastating. I was glad to see they were preventing people from bringing in coolers."

A cooler-sized package might be all that's needed to trigger an outbreak of smallpox or anthrax, considered the most deadly of the biological agents. It's not necessary to hijack a jet or build a sophisticated bomb to deliver the agents.

"It's probably harder to prevent than the kind of terror we saw last week, it's sad to say," Gilchrist said. "Someone can carry a small bag of material that can infect hundreds of thousands of people. You can carry that bag through virtually every airport security system I'm aware of. It won't attract attention from a drug-sniffing dog, either."

Gilchrist said the terror of jetliners slamming into the World Trade Center was visual and dramatic. Biological terror is sinister and subtle, she said.

"People are terribly afraid of things they don't understand or know about," Gilchrist said. "It could generate a lot of terror in that way, a different kind of terror."

It could also be more deadly. Gilchrist and other experts believe that toxic weapons in skilled hands could cause considerably more casualties among ordinary Americans than last week's attacks.

Those attacks also might have awakened Americans to the danger of biological terrorism, Gilchrist said.

"I think it could happen at any time," she said. "The problem we may have had before is that the average person thought it was science. Now, most people will believe it's a threat."

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On the Net: Iowa Hygienic Lab: http://www.uhl.uiowa.edu/

Centers for Disease Control's bioterrorism preparedness Web site: http://www.bt.cdc.gov Copyright © 2001, The Associated Press

-- Anonymous, September 21, 2001