Historical reconstruction of the community response, and related epidemiology, of a suspected biological weapon attack in Ningpo, Manchuria (1940)
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases, Public Health
- Keywords
- biological weapon, bioterrorism, biowarfare, plague
- Copyright
- © 2016 Wilson et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Historical reconstruction of the community response, and related epidemiology, of a suspected biological weapon attack in Ningpo, Manchuria (1940) PeerJ Preprints 4:e2117v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2117v1
Abstract
After the conclusion of World War II, members of the Imperial Japanese Army biological warfare Unit 731 testified to a Soviet military court they conducted a live test deployment of plague-infected fleas in Ningpo, Zhejiang Province, a city south of Shanghai with a population of approximately 300,000. The deployment triggered an outbreak involving 78 cases and 74 fatalities (case fatality rate 95%) that included the death of seven families. Children and young adults aged 11-30 were most severely effected. Despite lack of access to effective medical countermeasures, the Ningpo community exhibited a high degree of social cohesion and resilience in the context of effective public health response.
Author Comment
The question of whether a biological weapon attack did, indeed, occur due to intentional deployment by human beings is an extremely difficult one to pin down. The utter ideal is to have witness testimony by the perpetrators (that, hopefully, is not coerced), other hard evidence such as communications among the perpetrators discussing how it was done, and supportive evidence via bioforensics. But this ideal is extremely rare. Particularly with historical events.
In this case, we have a situation where the testimony of the perpetrators were captured by Soviet military legal counsel as well as the Americans. The question of whether the testimony was coerced will always be there and may not ever be disentangled. Further, when one examines the testimony carefully, it is apparent that the men the Soviets captured supported, but were not directly involved in deploying plague in Ningpo, Manchuria. And the testimonies of the American missionaries discussed the impact of an epidemic of unknown (but suspected) etiology, but not the act of deploying plague.
Therefore, we present this case study with less of an emphasis on attribution and more on a focus of how the community survived the attack- without any practical access to pharmaceutical countermeasures. We propose this is the main lesson from this case study and a warning to policy makers that would attempt to over-estimate the potential impact of an act of biological terrorism on society. Biological terrorism and warfare are important threats to our society. However appropriate contextualization of human response behavior is crucial when assessing these threats in contemporary society.