OKLAHOMA CITY — While bioterrorism is a valid threat, the amount the U.S. spends for defensive programs is unnecessary, a bioterrorism expert told an audience Tuesday at the OU College of Public Health.

Col. Ted Cieslak, the Department of Defense’s liaison officer to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, delivered the lecture, titled “Biowarfare and Bioterrorism: A Primer.” The lecture discussed the history of biological warfare and its significance today.

Cieslak said bioterrorism is the most significant biological warfare threat, but it is not a threat that warrants the amount of money spent on it.

“Fifteen years ago, this was a lecture that needed to be given, because at the time, it was a valid threat,” Cieslak said. “However, over the past decade, too much emphasis has been put on bioterrorism, and too many billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on somewhat dubious efforts for bioterrorism defense.”

Cieslak gave a brief history of biological warfare, dating the first instance back to the 14th century. He said biological warfare could be used for strategic, tactical and terrorist purposes.

He said biological weapons are considered a major risk because they are inexpensive to produce and can spread over great distances, sometimes in invisible clouds that are hard to detect until victims begin to show symptoms. The potential effects of such an attack include overwhelming medical facilities and causing panic.

However, in modern warfare, Cieslak said terrorism is the most common purpose for biological weapons, because very few large-scale weapons exist that could achieve strategic or tactical ends.

“Osama bin Laden presumably does want to rule the world, and presumably will kill millions of people to do that,” Cieslak said.

However, he said there are few weapons that exist that bin Laden could use for such a purpose.

He said modern terrorists mainly use biological weapons for publicity.

“If publicity is all [the terrorists] are after, anything makes a good weapon,” he said.

Cieslak gave an example of an event that happened April 1997 in Washington, D.C., when a postal clerk opened a letter that claimed to contain anthrax. While the letter did not actually contain anthrax, he said the event made a great publicity stunt because it shut down the U.S. Capitol during rush hour.

“Here’s a terrorist who got everything he ever could have hoped for,” Cieslak said. “If he could do that with nothing, imagine what you could do with an eyedropper full of anything you could find in your microbiology lab at this university, and have access to the salad bar at an inaugural ball.”

He said biological warfare reached its peak during the Cold War when the former Soviet Union created intercontinental ballistic missiles loaded with two highly contagious diseases, smallpox and bubonic plague.

“[Biological warfare] hasn’t been as front and center in the news recently as it was in the early years of this decade,” said Gary Raskob, dean of the OU College of Public Health. “Nevertheless it’s with us and continues to be an important area for national security and public health.”

Cieslak joined the CDC in 2006. From 1996 to 2001, he served as the chief of the operational medicine division at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md.