Propaganda or science? Biological warfare and the people of Iraq.

In the months leading up to the Anglo-American attack on Iraq, there was a plethora of reports in leading biomedical journals about biological weapons and bioterrorism. The coverage seemed out of proportion to the public health importance of bioterrorism, which has claimed only a small number of lives worldwide. In 2002, there were many more articles on bioterrorism than there were articles on road traffic crashes, which kill 3000 people each day worldwide. Before the war, opinion polls showed that most people in the United Kingdom opposed the launching of a military attack on the people in Iraq. To have supported the war, the public would have needed to believe that they were being attacked. Although there is no reason to suspect that this was a deliberate attempt to alarm the population, nevertheless the large number of articles on bioterrorism may have had this effect. To this end, medical journals may have played an important political part in justifying war in Iraq.