During the war, the Japanese army poisoned more than 1,000 water wells in Chinese villages to study cholera and typhus outbreaks. The Japanese tested at least 25 different disease-causing agents on prisoners and unsuspecting civilians. At its height, the programme employed more than 5,000 people, and killed as many as 600 prisoners a year in human experiments in just one of its 26 centres. He started his research in 1930 at the Tokyo Army Medical School and later became head of Japan's bioweapon programme during the Second World War ( Harris, 1992, 1999, 2002). The father of the Japanese biological weapons programme, the radical nationalist Shiro Ishii, thought that such weapons would constitute formidable tools to further Japan's imperialistic plans. Indeed, alarm bells should have rung as early as 1939, when the Japanese legally, and then illegally, attempted to obtain yellow fever virus from the Rockefeller Institute in New York ( Harris, 2002).

However, the Japanese embarked on a largescale programme to develop biological weapons during the Second World War ( Harris, 1992, 1999, 2002) and eventually used them in their conquest of China. Soon afterwards, the US government was also pressed to perform such research by their British allies who, along with the French, feared a German attack with biological weapons ( Moon, 1999, Regis, 1999), even though the Nazis apparently never seriously considered using biological weapons ( Geissler, 1999). Sir Frederick Banting, the Nobel-Prize-winning discoverer of insulin, created what could be called the first private biological weapon research centre in 1940, with the help of corporate sponsors ( Avery, 1999 Regis, 1999). In North America, it was not the government but a dedicated individual who initiated a bioweapons research programme. B, bacterium P, parasite T, toxin V, virus.

After the war, with no lasting peace established, as well as false and alarming intelligence reports, various European countries instigated their own biological warfare programmes, long before the onset of the Second World War ( Geissler & Moon, 1999).ДЎDoes not include time and place of production, but only indicates where agents were applied and probably resulted in casualties, in war, in research or as a terror agent. The German army was the first to use weapons of mass destruction, both biological and chemical, during the First World War, although their attacks with biological weapons were on a rather small scale and were not particularly successful: covert operations using both anthrax and glanders ( Table 2) attempted to infect animals directly or to contaminate animal feed in several of their enemy countries ( Wheelis, 1999). However, although these, as well as later treaties, were all made in good faith, they contained no means of control, and so failed to prevent interested parties from developing and using biological weapons. These dangers were soon recognized, and resulted in two international declarations-in 1874 in Brussels and in 1899 in The Hague-that prohibited the use of poisoned weapons. However, the foundation of microbiology by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch offered new prospects for those interested in biological weapons because it allowed agents to be chosen and designed on a rational basis. Man has used poisons for assassination purposes ever since the dawn of civilization, not only against individual enemies but also occasionally against armies ( Table 1). During the, the Japanese army poisoned more than 1,000 water wells in Chinese villages to study cholera and typhus outbreaks

Empire of the dawn strike the blood