Emergency Preparedness for the Primary Care Physician

Biological and chemical warfare date to biblical times. The Old Testament describes a series of plagues, some involving biologic agents, that convinced the Pharaoh to let the Jews escape slavery in Egypt, and Judges 9:45 has a reference to the use of salt to destroy crops (1). As early as 300 BC, Persian, Greek, and Roman literature discussed using animal and human cadavers to contaminate drinking water. In the middle ages, Tatar troops catapulted plague victims over their enemy's city walls (1–3). Aerosolized weapons appeared in the in the mid-seventeenth century, when a Polish infantryman suggested creating hollowed bombs filled with rabid dog saliva and other materials that could cause disease (1,3). In 1763, bioterrorism arrived in the New World, when British troops supplied smallpox contaminated blankets to Indian tribes during the French and Indian War (1–3).