What was it like to be on the receiving end of germ warfare? How did scientists and ordinary people in Vietnam react to being the target of alleged biological weapon? How did Vietnamese scientists, politicians, and citizens seek to mitigate the effects of biological warfare (real and imagined)?

In addition to serving as the chair of the first meeting of the BCT, Tôn Thất Tùng served as the president of the planning group assembled after the third meeting of the committee (March 8 to 10, 1953). Overall the committee noted with approval the patriotic hygiene movement. More specifically the planning group laid out three guiding principles to deal with biological weapons. These were:

1. The response to natural disasters should be used as a basis for the response to combatting enemy-inflicted destruction;
2. The Masses (i.e. the People) should be the basis of response;
3. There are two kinds of hygiene: short-term campaigns and everyday, regular practices. The short term campaigns are useful to establish regular practices and the regular practices are a continuation of limited-time campaigns.

This path explores this question by first looking at hunger. Then it moves to active responses to germ warfare through a pamphlet produced for Vietnamese and international audiences that recounted biological warfare and appropriate responses to it. This path suggests that fear of hunger, and emotional geographies of care, motivated rapid response to biological weapons and helped shape those responses.