Si bien el progreso en las ciencias y tecnologías biológicas ofrecerá más oportunidades para mejorar el bienestar humano en las próximas décadas, este progreso también podría reducir las barreras que impiden que agentes maliciosos diseñen patógenos para causar destrucción. En casos graves, los daños de futuros ataques biológicos podrían aproximarse a la magnitud de las peores plagas de la historia, desde la devastación causada por la peste negra hasta las epidemias que diezmaron las sociedades mesoamericanas tras el contacto inicial con los europeos.
Although progress in biological sciences and technologies will offer more opportunities to improve human well-being in the coming decades, this progress may also lower barriers that are blocking bad actors from engineering pathogens to cause destruction. In severe cases, the harms of future biological attacks may approach the magnitudes of the worst plagues of history—from the devastation wrought by the Black Death to the epidemics that decimated Mesoamerican societies after initial European contact.
In this report, the authors offer initial frameworks for thinking about how the United States could achieve resilience against three biological threat scenarios: (1) a fast scenario, challenging countermeasures with a rapidly spreading outbreak of a lethal human-to-human-transmissible pathogen; (2) a silent scenario, challenging detection with a pathogen that infects much of the population before infected people display visible symptoms; and (3) a saturating scenario, challenging countermeasures involving a pathogen that replicates and persists in the environment.
The authors recommend actions that governments and civil society can take to work toward resilience, including more in-depth research to better understand these scenarios and possible defenses.
Fuente: https://www.rand.org
