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Sometimes popular wisdom is so dead on right, its nearly profound. The trend of dubbing terrorists an "infection" is a case in point. This comparison has been used frequently as a fitting and satisfying way of demeaning these vile creatures - to wit: "you're just a lousy germ". But the similarity goes deeper than that, making the epithet all the more appropriate.

In recent years, the medical community has been trying to educate the public about an alarming trend. Certain strains of bacteria are developing resistance to most antibiotics. This is primarily because patients often cease taking their prescribed drugs as soon as they start to feel better, ignoring their doctor's orders for a full course of medication. Instead of having the antibiotics destroy the majority of the germs, with the immune system mopping up the rest, these patients give the infection a dangerous opportunity. They create a situation where a small population of bacteria can develop mechanisms to defeat the antibacterial effect of the drugs. The resulting newer, tougher and more dangerous strains are passed on to other people (usually in hospitals), and soon you have a resistant germ raising havoc in the general population. The trend has reached the point where even the common staph infection, once dismissed as a minor annoyance, can be a deadly threat. Pharmaceutical companies are scrambling to devise new antibiotics, before some of these germs become resistant to all existing drugs.

So it has also been with terrorists. For over 30 years we've been putting up with them, grieving for their victims, but treating them as a minor threat. Only moderate defenses have been raised to foil their efforts.

Yet we knew full well that these beasts in human form had far greater potential. In college almost 20 years ago, I myself wrote a paper that examined how technological change was altering the balance of power between terrorists and governments - and I concluded that the trend was in the terrorist's favor, with no end in sight. This concept was no great revelation to my professors, or their colleagues across the country. Still, decisive measures were considered unnecessary or too expensive.

Terrorists, like under-medicated germs, weren't eradicated. Instead they were encouraged by their successes, given incentive to strive for greater spectacles. The limited measures applied to thwart them merely forced them to develop better techniques of defeating our security. And, all the while, technology was multiplying the powers that could be wielded by one or a few individuals. Terrorists were given time to grow in sophistication: to acquire the skills, contacts and resources that would grant them access to the Pandora's box of misused technology.

Which brings us to the present. September 11th is rightfully deemed a warning. For the first time, terrorist capability was able to call forth the full destructive potential of a weapon. Our willful ignorance has born its bitter fruit. Only now do we embark on measures to make air travel as safe as it should have been all along.

We can be thankful, meanwhile, that hijacking is the only terrorist tool to reach full potential so far. The anthrax assaults, while resulting in vicious multiple murders, show that terrorists have yet to master biological weapons. But don't doubt for a moment that the perpetrators have closely watched the results, and are learning from them. And they will continue to reach for ever more powerful means, from nuclear devices to chemical poisons to computer network attacks.

For now, we're nearly unanimous in support of the campaign to demolish bin Laden's shadowy empire. But the effort doesn't end there, even if we're blessed with a clear cut victory. There will always be more discontented extremists, hungering for a chance to strike us, to win the kind of ignominious "fame" achieved by our recent assailants. So we'd better buck ourselves up for the long, difficult and probably bloody task of suppressing the new barbarians. Or, to put it another way, we'd better not cut our course of medication short.

Copyright ã, Douglas Holt, 2001