The most dangerous threats are the ones we never think about. Fortunately, we have Department of Defense professionals around here who do. Among them are Aberdeen Proving Ground scientists at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center.
What threat to national security are they protecting us against? Bee diseases. Don’t anybody laugh.
Economists estimate the spreading catastrophe of honeybee diseases could cost the U.S. $15 billion a year in direct crops losses and up to $75 billion a year in total economic impact. Oh, and then there’s that possible starvation thing.
This isn’t just about being able to drizzle a little honey on our toast.
Essential foods totally dependent on bees for pollination include apples, cucumbers, broccoli, onions, pumpkins, squash, carrots, blueberries, avocados, almonds, cherries and dozens of others.
Around the world, whole hives have been dying since 2005, and nobody knows exactly why.
Any enemy foreign or domestic that threatened our food supply and national economy to that degree would be considered a top-priority national security risk. Because it appears to be a self-inflicted wound, our political leaders are, at best, lethargic.
Not so those on the front lines of national defense actually doing the work of protecting us. They work in many capacities around here, from the National Security Agency and Fort Meade to APG.
Among those are the Edgewood scientists who took the bee diseases very seriously.
Now, they’ve found a virus in American honeybees previously found only in Europe. The technology they use could help discover why bee colonies worldwide are disappearing.
The virus they discovered is not harmful and probably is not a factor in colony collapses, but the fact that it showed up here exposes holes in our bio-security.
ECBC scientists were working with private companies to use the test equipment to look for another type of virus in the samples, but because the technology they used helped find a broader spectrum of viruses, they discovered the European virus using a technique that looks at the size of unknown viruses and the presence of small bits of proteins, and compares the sample with known viruses.
The detection technology being developed at ECBC for military use could help scientists identify other viruses that could be killing the bees.
Finding that out is more than a sweet deal for farmers. It is a matter of national security.
Researchers turned up the bee bug while developing technology for battlefield detection of viruses. It’s called Integrated Virus Detection System/Proteomic Mass Spectrometry, which could come in real handy facing threats we can easily understand, such as a possible bioterror attack.
And it turns out to be just the thing for more subtle and dangerous threats to national security most of us would not have put at the top of our lists.
