Panel to address bio-terror fears

There are fears biotechnology could fall into the wrong hands

An international review conference on biological weapons is getting under way in Geneva with fears about terrorists obtaining such weapons a main concern.

The convention banning biological weapons came into force in 1975 and is the world's oldest disarmament treaty, ratified by 155 countries.

It bars the development, production and stockpiling of all biological weapons.

But correspondents say biotechnology advances and the lack of a verification mechanism make enforcing the ban hard.

The BBC's Imogen Foulkes in Geneva says the treaty has a major weakness in that it has no powers to check that states are complying with the ban.

The last treaty review conference five years ago collapsed amid bitter divisions over verification. The US said at the time that verification would be impossible.

Diplomats say that since then, some of the rifts have been healed in informal discussions.

But the challenges for this review conference remain enormous, our correspondent says.

Economic damage

Advances in biotechnology have brought hope of new treatments for major diseases, like diabetes.

Biotechnology could be used to attack plants and animals

But new research has also made it possible to reconstruct the polio genome, or the Spanish flu virus of 1918, in the laboratory and there are fears that such research could be used by terrorist groups.

Jean Pascal Zanders, director of the Bio Weapons Prevention Project, a non-governmental organisation which monitors the ban on biological weapons, says the threat is real - but, unlike commonly depicted scenarios, it may not be directed against people.

"Bio-terrorism can also be applied against plants and animals and a lot of economic damage can be done," he says.

"Think for example of the foot-and-mouth outbreak in the UK, how much money it cost the livelihoods of people. So huge damage can be done, but not necessarily in terms of human casualties."

So bio-terrorism, bio-security and disease surveillance are all on the agenda for the conference.

The priority is to find ways, without establishing formal verification, of ensuring that countries really are living up to their promise never to develop biological weapons, our correspondent says.