The Great Bioterror Threat Is Modern Society

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent anthrax mailings, the United States government started taking the possibility of biological terrorism very seriously. It spent billions of dollars upgrading laboratories to securely study dread diseases, funded new research on how evildoers might weaponize pathogens, and generally turned the nation’s biological-threat indicator to yellow. 

Yet there was a terrible irony to this. Even as we looked to our enemies for infectious threats, we—as a, both to treat diseases in humans and to spur the growth of factory-farmed animals, has inundated our environments with antibiotics. From an evolutionary perspective, this amounts to massive, constant pressure for microbes to find and share ways to survive the antibiotic onslaught. We’ve created a world that favors, that actively encourages, the emergence of deadlier diseases.