And I thought my prescription drugs were expensive. The US government has just announced it was exercising its option to buy 20,000 treatment courses of ABthrax (raxibacumab) from Human Genome Sciences. That's $8250 a pop. It will go into the Strategic National Stockpile.
This drug is for inhalational anthrax, a disease practically no one in the world ever gets. Its only use would be the consequence of a massive bioterrorism attack. It is a monoclonal antibody directed against the anthrax organism's protective antigen, the protein that grabs onto the cell and forms a channel allowing another toxin, Lethal Factor, to enter the cell. ABthrax blocks the protective antigen induced channel. Hence it is a treatment that focuses on the anthrax toxin, not the organism itself, which is the target of the antibiotic Cipro. Once the toxins are produced Cipro is ineffective, so ABthrax is an important treatment -- if you have been attacked by someone who knows how to make and use weaponized anthrax and if you haven't been treated with Cipro in the several days after the attack.
In the unlikely event of an anthrax attack (weaponizing anthrax is difficult and few people know how to make it), there would be ample time to deploy mass prophylaxis with Cipro. Indeed your chances of actually getting some Cipro are far higher than your chances of getting one of the 20,000 pricey doses of ABthrax shipped direct to you from the Strategic Stockpile "just in time." And we don't even know if the ABthrax would work. It has never been tested for efficacy in humans, since we have no one who gets inhalational anthrax to try it on.
So the US government has no influenza vaccine for H5N1, a disease that has killed over a hundred people recently and made as many others desperately ill, but it does have a treatment for a disease that no one gets but is dear to the heart of the military and which they are right now trying to force vaccinate soldiers for, often against their will (Air Force Times; subscription wall)
If you are Human Genome Sciences, though, that's no problem. Not at $8250 a pop.
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thats 165 million dollars! omg just think what that could buy for pandemic preparedness
Correct me if I am wrong Revere but isnt inhalation anthrax to date nearly 100% fatal?
Contact anthrax is treatable but if it penetrates into the inner core of the body in any way via ingestion, inhalation, injection I believe it is a day disease. In other words you have about a day before enough of it has developed to set you up with a measuring for a body bag.
I agree 8200 bucks is a tad high. Its all about the specification the government issues in the contracts. Good example. Pencil sharpeners in the USAF. No kidding I saw the contract.
"Device for milling wooden dowels to finely ground point. Device should be either hand or electric driven, hand driven is preferred. Dowel size will range from 1 cm to 3 cms. "
Yeah, electric pencil sharpener.
As for the anthrax weaponization. Getting the cutters is the key. Anthrax is in the soil upon which we stand. Used to be that in the plains states after a good hard rain it would reproduce and then get blown by the wind in enough of a quantity for animals and a few people to get it. On the other hand if say N. Korea got the bug in quantity, could mill it and then put it into say a Scud-B or one of their intermediate range missiles and it were airburst over Japan, then you have a problem.
Yeah 165 million is a lot of money. But this is line item budget stuff. Someone in the CBW arena probably pointed out that Cipro might not work on some of the sexed up Russian or Korean anthrax. They also had to convince Congress that it was necessary to get it. Yep, the President signed the budget so we have $8250 doses of this stuff and 20,000 doses on the way. I dont think its enough as an airburst with a moderately high wind over say Chicago would downwind the stuff at 15,000 feet for 23 miles. Cipro is the treatment of preference but is there enough of that too?
Randy: Hard to judge the CFR for inhalational anthrax because it's so rare. As I recall it's something in the neighborhood of 50%. But you have to get it first, and almost nobody does. It's a bioweapon and never even successfully used for that. The anthrax attacks of 2001 came from someone in the US weapons establishment.
There's plenty of naturally occurring anthrax around, not only in the soil but animal cases occurr every year and cutaneous anthrax occurs elsewhere. But weaponizing it is said to be very difficult. It is not just size but surface charge. It is hard to get it to disperse and be respirable. You'd not only have to be able to do it at all, but then scale up to do it in reasonable quantity and then be able to deliver it. Not easy, not likely and compared to other risks not cost effective.
Anthrax seeds an area permanently, but is very non-contagious. The blowback to your own people would be minimal. This makes it a good weapon if you never plan to visit the areas you have seeded.
During the halceon days after the "BT Attacks" at the National Intruder and against them Libral newsies and politicians, we had a few spores show up at a postal facility in my area. Mind you, not enough to comprise an infective dose if all of them were inhaled by a single person, but enough to get people all excited. Especially, as it turns out, the union that represented the telephone workers who had been stringing cable near the facility where the box of stamps from New Jersey was received. They wanted Cipro for all of their members, and their families.Sort of like the teamsters wanting PAPRs for their members who drive ambulances, just in case of Panflu.
Depends on whether you count the result of accidental release of weaponised agent as a "success". If you do, you'll have to count Sverdlovsk.
Or the attack agent was successfully burgled from them. Fort Detrick hasn't had a stellar security record over the last 30 years or so.
This cost the USSR some big bucks and quite a bit of talent.
I get vey impatient with people who pooh-pooh the cost and effort involved in weaponization, testing, and quantity production. My informed guess (informed by the Soviet experience) is that this is easily 95% of the cost of a bioweapons program.
Another nontrivial problem.
Mr. Kruger, you are aware, are you not, that bioweapons payloads of ballistic missiles MUST be refrigerated during re-entry. Fail to do this, and re-entry heat sterilizes your weapon and renders it useless. Nukes are far easier to deliver as ICBM payloads, since they can withstand quite high levels of re-entry temperature.
The Soviets learned to do this, but reports of their success date from very, very late in the history of Biopreparat (1990-1991).