Bioterrorism Has Been Noted as the Use

Bioterrorism has been noted as the use of any kind of organism such as the bacteria, fungi or viruses, or any toxin (poisonous compounds that are produced by organisms) to eliminate the host. These elements are known to exist naturally within our environment. This then presents a legal loophole into who is supposed to posses these elements and what quantities would be termed as enough to be considered a weapon. There are real legal obstacles or shortcomings to the war against terror and in particular to the idea of bioterrorism. It is quite unclear at the global level what agents constitute biological weapons, and for the few known or categorized agents, there is no definite quantity that has been given a global legal framework to be able to be referred to as biological weapon hence constituting the possibility of being used for bio terrorism.

This lack of clear legal boundaries has been further exaggerated by the fact that many countries still do not have the legal framework to handle the bioterrorism. Some countries will even not cooperate with the frameworks that have been proposed to them in order to fight bioterrorism, further hindering the mitigation efforts.

This then calls for a surveillance system that will help cure the effects of this weapon incase it used by some terrorist group. Of central importance in the surveillance system is an operational laboratory where the suspicious elements can be processed fast and an action taken as fast as possible. Early detection and rapid response is also central to the surveillance of the bioterrorism and related activities. This can be effectively done by the use of the syndromic surveillance as well as the proposed surveillance using cell phones.

Both of these surveillance means have significant challenges that come with them making the fight or caution against bioterrorism elusive. There is the issue of syndromic surveillance depending on zip codes which proves to be unreliable as there is an underlying assumption that the mobility of the infected people is minimal or the infection will definitely happen when people are at home since it does not provide for the option of moving people. The data and information given by the syndromic surveillance is also quite nonspecific hence making it hard to identify a bioterrorism threat and make it out from the normal infections that could be plaguing an area. The cell phone surveillance also has its potential shortcomings since the participants may volunteer false information due to panic response to a situation that they have seen with another person or heard of such an outbreak and will take it that they also have the infection.