links   K.Alibek & St.Handelman J.Tucker, ed. T.Mangold & J.Goldberg K.A.Al-Abbas Hamzah, et al D.Wise J.Moreno ACDA archives Demon in the Freezer Hot Zone

Title AFGHANISTAN DIGEST, no.1
1983 video recordings
  Control No: NWDNM(m)-306.9044 & 306.9045
  Creating Org: U.S. Information Agency (USIA)

p 250   U.S. CRDF Civilian R&D Fdtn
CRDF funds U.S.-NIS collaboration on civilian basic & applied research conducted in the NIS in order to redirect efforts of former weapons scientists toward peaceful purposes and promote the development of market economies in the NIS. CRDF is a non-govtal, non-profit foundation est. 8.95 by National Science Foundation with an initial $5 million grant under the U.S. Defense Dept's Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program, matched by a $5 million grant from the Soros Foundation. FY1996, funding for much of the CRDF's activities shifted to the U.S. State Dept FREEDOM Support Act (FSA). Funds received by the CRDF are committed to its Cooperative Research Grants (CRG) competition, a "NextSteps to the Market" Program, Travel Grant Program (TGP), Regional Equipt Scientific Ctrs (RESC) Program and contract support programs.

In May 2000, CRDF and NIH jointly hosted an Intl Symposium in Moscow to highlight 5 of the most successful & promising U.S.-NIS scientist team presentations, including a team from former BW facility in Stepnogorsk, Kazakhstan and a team from the State Research Ctr for Applied Virology & Biotechnology (Vector) in Russia. These grants yielded numerous accomplishments, including hundreds of new joint publications, presentations at intl conferences, new insights into prevention & treatment of disease, potential pharmaceutical applications, as well as development of research capacity and new professional linkages. Nearly 100% of these projects plan to continue collaboration. Over 50% of the NIS partners have applied for competitive grant support to other organizations (e.g., NSF, World AIDS Foundation, etc.). 5 projects filed joint patents and others are working to submit "Next Steps to the Market" proposals.

In Soviet times, Karakalpakistan (NE Uzbekistan incl Aral Sea) served as … the piñata for some of the USSR's most wicked chemical & biological bastinados. In the middle of the Aral Sea, for instance, was Vozroszhdeniya (Rebirth) Island, on which, a British explorer was told in 1840, stood an enchanted castle guarded by dragons and surrounded by flaming quicksand.
The Soviet Union gave its all to make these stories metaphorically accurate, operating on Vozrozhdeniya Island one of its most secret anthrax manufacturing plants. This was the plant that the West first learned of in 1960, when Francis Gary Powers' U-2 spy plane glided over the Aral Sea and photographed the plant in high detail.

This was also the plant that had been left unguarded for a decade following Soviet collapse. The island's soil was still heavily inundated with vaccine-resistant anthraz the Soviets bioengineered. Cows could now walk to and from the island. Any cow unlucky enough to chance this journey was, reportedly, shot on sight. The island's desperately needed cleanup was … being handled by the U.S. State Dept, a rumor officially confirmed Oct. 2001, when Uzbekistan became an official ally in America's war in Afghanistan.
World's 8th largest divided island, at about 900 sq miles but the shrinking of the sea caused it to join to the mainland between June 2000 & June 2001.

Tom Bissel, Chasing the Sea p342
  addtl refs   ¹ ² ³ ^{4 5 6 7 8}
subcontractor   DoD DTRA

Russia's poorly guarded past
Security lacking at facilities used for Soviet bioweapons research ¹
6.17.02   Joby Warrick Wash.Post

Built ostensibly as a vaccine factory for farm animals, Pokrov operated for decades as a secret within a secret: An off-the-books participant in a clandestine military program that produced the most fearsome biological weapons ever imagined. Together with a sister plant across town, Pokrov specialized in livestock maladies such as foot & mouth disease that could be put into weapons and unleashed on American farms in a future war, Russian & U.S. officials say. … "Anti-livestock" or "anti-agriculture" weapons can wreak economic havoc and undermine a nation's ability to feed itself. Under the Soviets, as many as 6 agricultural research centers and up to 10,000 scientists & technicians were believed to have been devoted to developing them, working under a shroud of secrecy that persists today and complicates efforts to keep dangerous materials out of the hands of terrorists, U.S. officials say.

At some of the facilities, animals weren't the only targets. Pokrov's 5 underground bunkers were equipped as standby production facilities that could also manufacture smallpox weapons in times of war, according to former participants in the Soviet program & U.S. biodefense experts. "Pokrov could do it all," said a senior U.S. analyst familiar with the plant. "It could produce the virus . . . weaponize it and even fill the bombs." Russia says it has halted offensive biological research and destroyed its bioweapons stockpile. There are close parallels between offensive biological weapons programs, which use lethal pathogens, and the development of defensive vaccines and other medicines using the same dangerous materials. Russia, like U.S., continues to carry out research with a wide range of dangerous microbes, developing vaccines & drugs to defend against natural outbreaks as well as acts of terrorism.
Pokrov dir. Gavrilov said the facility is engaged only in developing vaccines & other civilian products. According to U.S. officials, the facility is believed to possess more than a dozen viruses, including Newcastle, a highly contagious disease that infects poultry and other birds. The microbes, along with equipt needed to grow them in massive quantities, are housed in a dilapidated compound that struggles daily to do the basics: patching together its ancient alarm system, paying the arrears of its electricity bill and keeping its underpaid scientists from being lured away to other countries.

Terrorism is a constant worry. Gavrilov acknowledged there have been break-ins, as well as attempts by mysterious "Arab businessmen" to purchase various things. He said none of the attempts succeeded, as far as he knows. "We have security concerns," the plant's director said cautiously. "But fixing them will be complicated and expensive." Western govts have done virtually nothing to help, despite a growing awareness of the disaster that could result if terrorists acquire a single vial of the deadly microbes stored at Pokrov and more than 50 similar sites in the former Soviet Union. U.S. programs launched 10 years ago to help Russia secure its nuclear weapons have only recently begun targeting biological ∓ chemical facilities, and progress has been slowed by money shortages and bureaucratic resistance in both countries.

Some of the largest of the former Soviet bioweapons centers, such as Vector, the onetime smallpox production complex in western Siberia, have erected fences and installed security cameras in the past 3 years with U.S. assistance. But at Pokrov, the first formal security assessment isn't scheduled to begin until the fall, despite 2 years of requests for assistance. Other bioweapons factories have yet to be visited by U.S. officials. "On the biological side we are far, far behind," said microbiologist & bioweapons expert Raymond Zilinskas with the Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies in California. "There's a whole history of things that went on in these plants that we don't even know about."

In a country that produced the world's largest stockpiles of biological weapons, there are ample reasons to fear the unknown. Iran has made attempts to obtain Russian material and know-how for its own bioweapons programs. The same al Qaeda leaders that plotted to explode a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States had an equally ambitious plan for acquiring bacteria and viruses of the kind used in Soviet weapons programs, CIA officials told Congress this year. Former senator Sam Nunn, who has long advocated securing Soviet weapons of mass destruction as a national priority, said a brief visit to Pokrov last month was a reminder of why loose biological, nuclear and chemical material remains the "world's gravest threat." "We are in a new arms race: a race between those seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction and those seeking to stop them," Nunn said. "Keeping dangerous things out of the hands of dangerous people is the most important thing we can do."

Even now, a decade after the Soviet Union collapsed, Pokrov's managers won't talk about the peculiar brand of agricultural research conducted there in the last decade of the Cold War. Officially, the story is the same as it was in Soviet times: The plant produced only livestock & poultry vaccines for peaceful purposes. As a civilian institute of the Agriculture Ministry, Pokrov had no visible ties to the Soviet military. It also had no official link to Biopreparat, the secret agency established by Soviet military leaders in the early 1970s to launch a massive biological weapons program under the guise of a network of civilian pharmaceutical plants. While Russian officials acknowledged Biopreparat's existence in the early 1990s, Moscow has never fully disclosed the contributions of other Soviet agencies, such as the Agriculture & Health ministries, to the bioweapons effort.

At Pokrov, the official story begins to unravel within minutes of entering the sprawling campus 50 miles east of Moscow. The plant's most prominent feature is a row of nuclear-hardened bunkers, an odd architectural choice for an institute concerned mostly with preventing Newcastle disease in chickens. Deputy Director Valery Stavnichy, in leading visitors through the complex, freely pointed out the bunkers' safety features, including the heavy blast doors and an underground water system that ensured uninterrupted production "in the event of emergencies." What kinds of emergencies? "Hurricanes. Or earthquakes," the deputy director replied. The Moscow region is not known for either.
Equally jarring to Western visitors is the scale of Pokrov's virus-making capacity. British bioweapons expert David Kelly who was among first Western scientists to visit the factory, recalled his initial shock at finding bunkers filled with row after row of incubators that collectively held tens of thousands of hen eggs. "That's the standard method for growing smallpox virus," he said.

A clearer picture of Pokrov's past has recently begun to take shape from the stories of former Biopreparat officials & U.S. officials and scientists who have slowly built relationships with their Russian counterparts. Former Biopreparat deputy director Ken Alibek who helped expose the Soviet Union's secret bioweapons programs when he defected to U.S. 1992, said Pokrov's official role as a vaccine factory was a perfect cover for one of the biggest virus mills in the Soviet Union. If war appeared imminent, Pokrov was equipped to immediately begin production of smallpox virus at a staggering rate of 200 tons a year, said Alibek, now vice chairman & chief scientist of the Alexandria VA biotechnology firm Hadron Inc., in an interview.

Mobilization orders never came. But throughout their history, the Pokrov plant and its sister facility across town tested viruses for use in new types of biological weapons that targeted livestock and poultry. Igor Domaradsky, a former chairman of the Soviet Union's secret Interagency Science & Technology Council on Molecular Biology & Genetics, said Pokrov was "one of the biggest" players in an extensive network of institutes exploring anti- crop & anti-livestock weapons that could be delivered by bomb or missile. He said most of the research centered around foot & mouth disease, the same illness that prompted the slaughter last year of more than 4 million cows, pigs and sheep in Britain. "Both of these [Pokrov] facilities were well equipped with a good system of sanitation & security to prevent the possibility of an escape of [viral] agents," said Domaradsky, 77, in an interview at his apartment in Moscow. "Had any escaped, it could have led to the death of many cattle, not to mention an international reaction which would have been very hard to contain."

Eventually, the Soviets abandoned most of the anti-agriculture research, primarily because of the expense and serious reservations among Soviet military planners about the weapons' effectiveness, Domaradsky said. The retired scientist in a 1995 memoir defied Russia's scientific establishment by describing formerly secret details of Biopreparat's activities. He scoffed at what he called the "failure of memory" of Russian officials who still refuse to own up to the nation's past bioweapons activities. But whether they want to talk about it or not, he said, Russian officials must deal with the legacy of Biopreparat and Pokrov, which includes protecting some of the world's most dangerous viruses against theft. "Even to support vaccine production you need many different strains, a whole collection of them," he said. "And these need very tight security."

Each night at 5 p.m., as the last of the Pokrov plant's day shift boards the village bus for home, the job of protecting the factory's virus collection falls to a night watchman and a large German shepherd. The dog is judged highly capable, "he's very mean," one plant official confided, but also a poor substitute for the kind of security called for at a place that holds the seeds of multiple epidemics. If the dog is reliable, that is more than Pokrov can claim for the rest of its security apparatus. The plant's alarm system is 30 years old, and officials acknowledge it no longer works in parts of the campus, which is overrun with weeds and littered with debris.
The military garrison once assigned to Pokrov is gone, and today's guards are mostly old men. A visitor recently saw no sign the guards were armed. There are bars on the windows in the small building where pathogens are kept. But once inside, security for the virus freezers consists of a simple lock and a string with a seal of soft clay. A disturbed seal is a signal that viruses may have been tampered with, presumably after the thief has gotten away.

Lawrence Renteria, security contractor who is helping several former weapons plants improve their systems, said Pokrov is in better shape than some. "It isn't pretty," Stratford Technology (Montross, VA) sr system engineer Renteria. "At one plant we visited, security consisted of 2 fat guys in sweat pants. They say they patrol the plant. But we know they don't."
Officials at Pokrov are acutely aware of the problems with security but said they lacked the money to fix them. 4 years ago, the plant ran out of money for its staff, some of whom worked for up to 6 months without a paycheck, which was common in Russia during the 1990s. Today Pokrov pays workers the equivalent of $65 a month, with senior scientists earning about $145. Pokrov director Gavrilov is eagerly courting Western firms for potential joint ventures that could help pay for new equipt. He also is waiting for U.S. officials to deliver on 2 year old promise to install a modern security system.

The delay, U.S. officials explained, is due to competing demands on the limited money Congress sets aside each year to help protect & dismantle Soviet weapons of mass destruction. Funding for the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, established by Nunn & Sen. Richard G. Lugar, R-IN in 1991, has remained essentially flat in recent years, and had been targeted for deep cuts before 9.11.01. For most of the past decade, greater emphasis was placed on safeguarding nuclear materials and physically dismantling strategic weapons such as the massive Soviet submarines that could launch nuclear missiles. Officials acknowledge the U.S. efforts were relatively slow to recognize the threat posed by biological & chemical weapons facilities in the former Soviet Union. Despite substantial progress, the U.S. programs have managed to provide security upgrades for only about 40% of Russia's nuclear facilities, and a much smaller percentage of biological & chemical sites. Lugar, who is pressing for legislation to expand the program, said at the current rate it will be 27 years before some Russian facilities are fully secure.
If someone gets their hands on just one of these weapons of mass destruction, the horror will be so awesome that all of life will change substantially," Lugar said during a visit to Russia in May. "If we do not take the leadership and take it aggressively, heaven help the rest of the world."

In the western Siberian town of Koltsovo, 1,800 miles east of Pokrov, Russia's only authorized smallpox research facility scarcely worries about intruders. The former bioweapons complex known as Vector is now ringed by 3 brand-new fences and a network of the latest Western-made cameras & motion sensors. Troops armed with assault rifles patrol the entrances, stopping & searching each vehicle that arrives or departs from the State Research Center for Virology and Biotechnology, as Vector is formally known. These days, many of the vehicles carry Western businessmen & scientists involved in one of nearly 50 joint ventures currently underway here. Lev Sandakhchiev, a biologist who now serves as director, acknowledged that new fences have not solved all of Vector's problems. But the heavy U.S. & European presence here appears to have eased multiple security concerns, including the fear that Iran would steal Vector's microbes or expertise.

"We no longer hear about the Iranians here," said one senior U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We know they are active in other places, second-tier places, but not at facilities where we have influence." It almost didn't turn out that way. As recently as 1998, Iran was aggressively wooing Vector's top scientists & officers, proposing cooperative ventures intended to enhance Tehran's biological capabilities, said Yuri Klimov, Vector's financial director. Klimov said he was one of several Vector officials invited to visit Tehran to explore business opportunities, an invitation he accepted. Describing the encounters in an interview outside Vector's front gate, the natty, powerfully built Klimov said the Iranians turned up at a time of great uncertainty for the institute, which was then struggling to find its niche amid Russian economic chaos and a newly competitive business climate. "They invited some of our scientists to go to Tehran. I myself went there twice," Klimov said. "They offered our scientists $5,000 a month, a very good salary."

The Iranians were vague about their intentions, even with their Russian guests in Tehran, he said. "They talked about arranging a joint research facility, and they were interested in technologies that we had, especially our expertise in virology," he said. "To be honest, I never understood it. And they would never directly answer our questions." All the scientists eventually returned to Russia, Klimov said, and further contact with the Iranians was halted, for the simple reason that newly arriving Western scientists were making a better offer. "This was the same time when we began to arrange research contacts with U.S." he said. "Ultimately we made a decision to go that way instead."

U.S. calls germ warfare pact 'unfixable'
7.25.01   Carol Giacomo Reuters

public relations problem
He acknowledged that it looked bad for the U.S. to be seen as opposing an arms control agreement but insisted there was no way the Bush team could accept something so ''inimical'' to U.S. national security interests. Unlike other arms control accords, the original convention contained no plan for checking that member states abided by the ban on making, stockpiling or using such weapons. The official said the Clinton White House had identified the same problems with the proposed enforcement protocol, the subject of decade-long negotiations. The accord called for inspections and other means of verifying compliance with the ban. But it would expose the U.S. to unacceptable risks in 3 areas, he said.
First, it would open America's biological warfare defense programs and facilities to inspection. "It is the judgement of our exerts that knowledgeable inspectors coming in, even in relatively limited circumstances, could learn enough from those inspections about our defense preparations ... (to devise) countermeasures,'' the official said. Second, it would give developing countries, long keen to ''pirate' U.S. pharmaceutical and bio-technical know-how, a way to acquire American intellectual property, he said. U.S. industry is not involved in making biological weapons but would be "subject to the same sort of transparency and inspections procedures as the Iranian ministry of health, a case of false symmetry that provides us no up side but poses substantial downside risk,'' the official said.

Finally, the draft protocol contains language that could allow countries to undermine the very strict system of U.S. export controls, as well as an informal global export control system known as the Australia Group. "If the system of export controls were undercut then we think we'd lose the one really effective Intl multinational vehicle that we have to limit the spread'' of materials that could be used for biological weapons, he said. He said it was the "unanimous'' view of all major U.S. agencies that the inspection protocol added nothing to Washington's ability to monitor the spread of germ warfare technology. "We believe our national technical means are going to tell us as much as were going to know,'' the official said, referring to spy satellites and other espionage tools. He said the administration would consult extensively with other countries on an alternatives to the protocol ahead of a biological weapons conference set for November. U.S. proposals include tighter export controls and stronger legal prohibitions against the use of biological weapons, in violation of the original convention.

echoes   1 week between 9.11.01 &
Sept. 18 when first 2 letters & probably another, never found, to AMI were postmarked.

… Judicial Watch represents hundreds of postal workers from Wash. D.C. Brentwood Postal Facility. Until Brentwood facility was finally condemned by CDC, Brentwood postal workers handled all Wash.D.C. mail incl "official mail" that contained the anthrax-laden envelopes addressed to Sen. Daschle & Leahy. While Capitol Hill workers received prompt medical care, Brentwood postal workers were ordered by USPS officials to continue working in the contaminated facility. 2 Brentwood workers died from inhalation anthrax, and dozens more are suffering from a variety of ailments related to the anthrax attacks. A variety of legal actions are planned for disparate treatment & reckless endangerment Brentwood postal workers faced.

In Oct. 2001, press reports revealed White House staff had been on regimen of powerful antibiotic Cipro since 9.11.01. Judicial Watch is aggressively pursuing disclosure of the facts & the decision for White House staff & Pres.GWBush to begin taking Cipro nearly a month before anthrax was detected on Capitol Hill. …

Connecticut, D.C. anthrax same
11.24.01   Guy Taylor Wash.Times

Meanwhile, the CDC confirmed that a letter sent from Switzerland to Chile was tainted with anthrax spores. The letter was sent to Dr. Antonio Banfi, a pediatrician at a children's hospital in Santiago. Dr. Banfi, who opened the envelope, and 12 others nearby have tested negative for anthrax exposure but were being treated as a precaution, according to the Chilean Health Ministry. Chilean officials said Dr. Banfi became suspicious because the letter was postmarked in Zurich but bore a Florida return address. There have been several other reports of anthrax spores being found in mail worldwide, but most have turned out to be false. In Connecticut, Mr. Rowland said tests have not detected any anthrax spores at the post office in Seymour, which handles mail for Oxford, or the processing center in Wallingford, which sorts mail for all of southern Connecticut. About 400 post offices in the region also have tested negative for anthrax exposure. Mrs. Lundgren, a retired legal secretary, on Wednesday became the fifth U.S. fatality of inhalation anthrax, the most deadly form of the disease. Friends and relatives said she seldom left home, except to visit the library, a beauty parlor, doctor's office and her church. Authorities said her death resembles that of Kathy T. Nguyen, a New York hospital worker who died last month. 3 other persons who have died from the disease since Oct. 4 had direct contact with tainted mail at their workplaces.

In the District, Bill Burrus, president of the 360,000 member American Postal Workers Union, recommended his members refuse to work in buildings where any trace of anthrax spores remains. U.S. Postal Service has tested 279 facilities nationwide for anthrax exposure, 21 of which tested positive for "at least trace amounts of anthrax," said Postal Service spokesman Jerry Kreienkamp. All but two, the District's central mail-processing facility on Brentwood Road NE and a post office in Trenton, NJ, have been cleaned & reopened, Mr. Kreienkamp said. No postal employees have been allowed to work at the Brentwood Road and Trenton facilities, he said. But Mr. Burrus said he became alarmed when anthrax-contaminated sorting equipment at a NY facility was cordoned off and cleaned while work continued in the rest of the building. Having postal workers wear masks & gloves while hazardous materials experts are doing cleanup nearby "is not sound medical procedure," he said. Mr. Kreienkamp said that the cleaning took place "on a different" floor from the postal workers, and that the Postal Service "followed the recommendations of health experts."

At least 20,000 postal workers have been given antibiotics. Mr. Burrus said even after a facility has been cleaned, "testing is imperfect at best. If there is something on a wall or the lights and if it becomes airborne, there's a risk of exposure." A postal manager at the Bladensburg Road post office in the District said the postal union would be going too far if it asks employees to not show up for work. "The union has a right to do what they're doing; they're just trying to stick up for their guys," said Brian McCutchan, who manages the post office at 3178 Bladensburg Road NE. "But if a facility tested positive for anthrax and it's been cleaned out and tested again and there's no more anthrax there, I say go back to work. It's not like the Postal Service is trying to hide anything." Mr. Kreienkamp said the delivery of an estimated 20 billion pieces of holiday mail will not be delayed by union resistance. "We know [the workers] are going to deliver this holiday season as they always have," he said.

Source elusive in probe of fatal anthrax
11.22.01   Guy Taylor Wash.Times

The U.S. Postal Service said mail to Oxford goes through a processing center in Wallingford, Conn., which recently was tested for anthrax exposure and showed no sign of contamination. Friends of Mrs. Lundgren's yesterday said that although she was not very mobile, she had a strong interest in working in her garden, a detail that could help investigators determine the source of the anthrax that killed her. "I know she's a gardener," said Ann Cummings, who works in the Oxford Town Hall. Miss Cummings said Mrs. Lundgren lived near Route 67 in Oxford, about three miles from a dairy farm. Health officials have said anthrax can commonly be found where people raise livestock. Animals contract anthrax by grazing on soils naturally contaminated with the bacteria. Before the postal anthrax attacks began last month, inhalation anthrax was reported to be extremely rare in the U.S. Mrs. Lundgren's case is the second within a month without any apparent connection to the anthrax-laced mail. CDC dir. Dr. Jeffrey Koplan yesterday said it is not likely that inhalation anthrax is more common than health officials originally thought, and that doctors had been overlooking cases. Health officials have said a person must inhale between 8,000 to 10,000 microscopic anthrax spores to contract the inhalation form of the disease. That number of spores can fit on the head of a pin. Pat Deangelis, who works in Oxford's town library, where Mrs. Lundgren was a "regular customer," said he and other librarians were searching for answers about how their friend got anthrax. "It probably had something to do with the farm," Mr. Deangelis said. The FBI's field office in New Haven, Conn., yesterday had not ruled out that possibility. "It's absolutely within the scope of something we'll be looking at," FBI spokeswoman Lisa Bull said. "We're looking at anything she may have come into contact with."

CDC spokeswoman Bernadette Burden said yesterday "in terms of [that] theory, we are keeping an open mind. We're not ruling out any possibilities." Mrs. Lundgren died at 10:32 a.m., 5 days after she was admitted to Griffin Hospital in Derby with a respiratory infection, the hospital's president, Patrick Charmel, said at a news conference. Doctors at the hospital, who initially suspected pneumonia, determined it was anthrax after blood tests Saturday. Meanwhile, federal officials continue to examine a suspicious letter sent to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat, that was found Friday in a bag of quarantined congressional mail. Tests of air and materials surrounding the letter at an Army lab in Fort Detrick, Md., suggest it contains billions of anthrax spores, enough to kill thousands of people, FBI officials told The Washington Post. U.S. Postal Inspector Dan Mihalko on Tuesday told The Washington Times the Leahy letter initially was misrouted on Oct. 12 to a State Dept mail facility in Sterling VA where a worker contracted inhalation anthrax. The misrouting explains why the letter never reached Mr. Leahy and may explain the high concentration of anthrax spores found in the Sterling facility, he said.

Bioweapons research proliferates
4.27.98   Ricki Lewis The Scientist

The U.S. offensive bioweapon effort began in 1942 but never approached the scale of the Manhattan Project, the effort during World War II to develop the atomic bomb, according Mark Wheelis, a professor of microbiology at the University of California, Davis. "There was a well-funded, coherent, ambitious, broadly designed program to develop actual weapons, to be delivered in shells, missiles, and bombs," he says. A facility at Ft Detrick in Frederick, MD, stored 5,000 bombs loaded with anthrax spores; a production facility operated in Terre Haute, IN; and Mississippi and Utah had test sites. President Richard Nixon nixed the program in 1969, citing obsolescence because conventional & nuclear weapons were a sufficient deterrent, Wheelis adds. By 1973, the bioweapons and records had been destroyed. Today, a sealed, 4 story building at Ft Detrick contains fermentation tanks once used to grow anthrax bacilli and other pathogens, providing testimony to the old U.S. offensive program.
Recent bioterrorism incidents are rare. The only known U.S. case was the deliberate contamination of restaurants with Salmonella typhimurium by the Rajneeshee cult in Les Dalles, Ore., in 1984. Cult members seeded salad bars with the bacteria, sickening more than 750 diners, none fatally. "The plot was to put people out of action during a county election so that the cult's preferred candidates would win," recalls Tucker. And in March 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo sect released the nerve gas sarin in a Tokyo subway, following failed attempts by the group in 1993 to release anthrax spores from a building and botulinum toxin from a vehicle, and a 1992 trip to Zaire to obtain Ebola virus for weaponization.

Biological weapons have been around since medieval warriors hurled plague-ridden corpses over city walls to destroy their populations. Today what was once called "germ warfare" is even more threatening because of the ability to genetically alter pathogens. Recent events in the Persian Gulf and the United States have riveted attention on the "weaponization" of bacteria, viruses, and toxins. "Every time something happens with Saddam Hussein or there is a potential terrorist incident, it's a reminder that we aren't in a position to defend ourselves. So govt, academia, and private industry are building defenses against bioweapons," says Patricia Irving, president of InnovaTek Inc. in Richland, Wash., which is developing devices to detect airborne pathogens.
In October 1997, a United Nations special commission discovered evidence of bioweapons in Iraq; a month later, Iraq barred a U.S. team from inspecting suspect facilities, nearly precipitating war. On the bioterrorist front, in February 1998 two men were arrested in Las Vegas, Nev., for allegedly transporting anthrax bacilli for the purpose of creating a weapon. Authorities dropped the charges within days, however, when the FBI determined that the men had a vaccine strain, which they reportedly were stockpiling in case of attack by Iraq. And between the Iraq and Las Vegas incidents, President Bill Clinton announced last January in his State of the Union address his intent to strengthen the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) "with a new international inspection system to detect and deter cheating."

On the domestic front, more than 100 U.S. cities began biowarfare preparedness programs in the summer of 1997 as part of the federal Defense Against Weapons of Mass Destruction Act of 1996. Recent legislation has also made it harder to obtain cultures of pathogenic organisms. "If you order Ebola virus, for example, from the American Type Culture Collection [in Rockville, Md.], they can't just mail it to you. The lab must be registered, and the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] must investigate the lab to see if proper controls are there," explains Zachary Selden, a policy associate at Business Executives for National Security, a Washington, D.C., organization concerned with biowarfare issues.
But reaction to a possible bioweapons threat has been a long time in coming, maintains Marie Chevrier, senior research associate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. "Bioweapons have not been on people's radar screens, and it hadn't reached a high enough policy level until recently because of interagency arguing. The Federation of American Scientists [FAS, a private, nonprofit policy organization] issued a report in 1990 with recommendations for BWC verification protocols," she says.

A biological weapon delivers highly virulent and incapacitating pathogens or their toxins. A millionth of a gram of anthrax can kill a person; a gram of aerosolized botulinum toxin can kill 1.5 million people. "Dozens of species of bacteria have been used or could be used. Or, someone could genetically engineer a new microorganism or make one antibiotic-resistant or more toxic," explains David Ecker, managing director of combinatorial drug discovery at Isis Pharmaceuticals Inc. in Carlsbad, Calif. Adds Jonathan Tucker , director of the biological weapons nonproliferation project at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif.: "When delivered through the air, bioweapons are tasteless, odorless, and invisible, making it difficult to know you are under attack until it is too late."
Although bioweapons are called "the poor man's atomic bomb" because disease-causing bacteria and their toxins are relatively simple and cheap to produce, they aren't easy to deliver in a way that can inflict mass casualties. "Using a biological agent as a weapon of mass destruction requires disseminating it through the atmosphere as an aerosol cloud--a suspension of microscopic particles--from a low-flying aircraft, a moving vehicle, or an urban rooftop," Tucker points out. "The agent particles must be the right size to be inhaled deep in the lungs and enter the bloodstream, where the microbes replicate to cause disease. But preparing and disseminating a biological aerosol to infect large numbers of people is technically challenging and requires expertise beyond what an ordinary microbiologist can do." The U.S. had an offensive bioweapons program until President Richard Nixon halted it in 1969, before the BWC was signed in London, Moscow, and Washington on April 10, 1972. Almost every country has signed this treaty, but the problem has been enforcing it. Today bioweapons research in the U.S. is strictly defensive, with stiff penalties for efforts to create such weapons, notes Gregory Wallance, a former federal prosecutor and partner at Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hayes, and Handler in New York City. Much of the defensive research is conducted at or funded by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), part of the U.S. Department of Defense based in Arlington, Va. "The bread-and-butter microbiology is done at USAMRIID, and most if not all of it is unclassified. The high-tech arm is DARPA," says Mark Wheelis, a professor of microbiology and a bioweapons historian at the University of California, Davis.
USAMRIID's 1998 budget is $25 million, with $3 million supporting extramural medical biological defense research. DARPA is entirely extramural and funds innovative ideas. Of a total 1998 budget of $2.04 billion, $60.8 million funds biological warfare defense, with $88 million slated for FY1999. Bioweapons defense research includes developing vaccines, antibiotics, air-filtration devices, and biosensors, in addition to conducting epidemiology studies. Microbiology research takes center stage before the fact, but the focus would shift to public health specialists in the event of actual use. "Unless terrorists provided advance warning or a delivery device was found, we wouldn't know that a biological aerosol attack had occurred until the disease had incubated for a few days," notes Tucker. "Then lots of people would begin showing up in emergency rooms with nonspecific symptoms. We would need an effective system of disease surveillance to recognize that people had been infected with an exotic agent. Patients with anthrax, plague, or tularemia respond to antibiotics administered before the onset of acute symptoms."

Other life sciences are also useful to bioweapons defense. Irving applies her expertise in acid rain at InnovaTek. "I did my Ph.D. work in aerosol science and air pollutants, on small particles of acidic sulfate aerosols that can impact on the human respiratory system. This is very much related to biological weapons," she remarks. The company's devices capture and concentrate particulates, which can then be passed to sensor and detection devices. One such detector is being developed by two researchers from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg: William Velander, a professor of chemical engineering, and Kent Murphy , an associate professor of electrical engineering. A polymer containing antibodies specific to certain pathogens is coated onto optical fibers, through which an ultraviolet laser passes. Antibodies that bind pathogens in the air change the optical signals. "We would like to make an array of sensors in one support system, to measure different agents," says Murphy.
Research at Isis picks up where detection leaves off, seeking a way to cripple pathogens. The company's $2.5 million DARPA-funded project scans bacterial genomes to identify uniquely microbial genes to exploit as molecular Achilles heels. "The variety of the dozen or so microorganisms whose genomes have been sequenced is quite enough for us to mine to identify RNA sequences common to all bacteria," says Ecker. So far, they have found six. Next, computer modeling will identify small molecules that could bind to and silence the RNAs, and then combinatorial chemistry will be used to synthesize thousands of variations on those themes, eventually yielding new antimicrobials.

Engineering Animation Inc. in Ames, Iowa, is exploring the big picture of defensive bioweaponry. Staff molecular biologists, anatomists, and multimedia artists created a short 3-D video that follows deadly viruses into the lungs to the bloodstream, where they encounter a microscopic arsenal of antibodies, antisense agents, and cell-death triggers. One scenario depicts red blood cells binding to pathogens and escorting them to the liver for dismantling, a strategy based on research by Ronald Taylor, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Virginia. "The feel and pace is like a battle in the body, and these agents are the advance troops," explains Adrian Sannier, vice president and general manager of interactive production at Engineering Animation. The video was done for DARPA to show to nontechnical audiences.
At the heart of controlling bioweapons is the "dual-use" dilemma--a weapons facility resembles a microbiology lab. "Any discovery in pathology or epidemiology can be applied to benefit mankind or misapplied for a malevolent purpose," says Wheelis. For example, investigators at the State Research Centre for Applied Microbiology in Obolensk, Russia, reported a genetically engineered strain of anthrax that resists the Russian vaccine (A.P. Pomerantsev et al., Vaccine, 15:1846-9, 1997). Most bioweapons experts interpret the work as vaccine research, Selden notes, but some critics see it as legitimizing past efforts to design vaccine-resistant anthrax.

Arthur Caplan The BWC bans the development and production of biological weapons, but not research on infectious diseases, which is essential for progress in medicine and public health. But "the line between research and development is often blurred, and it is difficult to distinguish between offensive and defensive work on dangerous pathogens and toxins," comments Tucker. That blurring concerns the Biotechnology Industry Association (BIO) and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), both based in Washington, D.C. These organizations abhor biowarfare but acknowledge that inspections of all facilities capable of microbe weaponization could "open the door to the potential for industrial espionage," such as sampling proprietary agents, according to Selden.
Scientists from the FAS & PhRMA met in Geneva the week of March 9 to discuss ways to strengthen BWC compliance protocols without compromising commercial efforts. They identified specific "triggers" that should be considered as sufficient for a facility to have to file a declaration that it is not producing bioweapons. These triggers include very-large-scale microbial production capabilities, participation in biodefense work, and use of a pathogen that could be used in a bioweapon.

Meanwhile, efforts are well under way to develop procedures for checking compliance with the BWC. An international ad hoc group is meeting for 11 weeks this year to negotiate procedures for inspecting facilities, but they haven't agreed yet on whether to call for inspection of all declared facilities, or just those suspected of violating the treaty. "The hope is by the end of 1998 to have a conceptual framework, and by the end of 1999, protocols to go back to the convention for ratification," says Alan Goldhammer, director of technical affairs at BIO.
The time to take biowarfare seriously has come, says Chevrier. World War I involved chemicals and chemical weapons; World War II involved physicists and atomic bombs. Now attention is turning to the life science community, which is trying not to follow in the footsteps of the physical scientists. Concludes Irving: "We were focused on the high-tech stuff, and we weren't paying attention to what really is a low-tech weapon. Now that the Cold War is over and high-tech threats are less, the threat of bioweapons is more obvious."

U.S. plans to produce new strain of anthrax
9.5.01   People's Daily

Earlier, the White House acknowledged the U.S. has spent years conducting secret research on biological weapons with the goal of developing vaccine to protect U.S. soldiers from attacks. The research is "purely defense and falls within limits set by 1972 treaty aiming to curb development & use of such arms, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer claimed. On Tuesday, NYTimes reported the research, begun under Clinton administration, pushes the limits of that treaty, which allows nations to work on vaccines & other protective measures.

Anthrax market easily accessed on internet
10.16.01   Sabin Russell NYTimes syndicate

There is no one-click Internet shopping for microbes on the World Federation for Collections Web site, but all 46 anthrax suppliers give telephone numbers, e-mail contacts and mailing addresses for further information. Now that anthrax has found its way into American newsrooms, killing a Florida tabloid photo editor, infecting the assistant to NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw in New York, and scaring the daylights out of a nation already traumatized by spectacular mass murder, the easy access to dangerous germs is up for a new round of scrutiny. The World Federation of Culture Collections is a respected group whose members include prestigious universities on 6 continents. Together, they nurture more than 1 million living strains of bacteria, fungi and other microbial specimens. Bylaws of the organization, a loose-knit association of 472 repositories of living microbial specimens in 61 countries, insist that "particular attention needs to be given to the containment and security aspects of strains which are potentially harmful to man, animals or crops.''
American laboratories have the capacity to determine within hours whether the anthrax spores found in NY & FL match any of more than 1,200 known strains. Such genetic fingerprinting could pinpoint whether the strain was natural or the product of genetic engineering and could provide clues as to whether it came from a university lab or a bioweapons laboratory such as those operated by Iraq. "We can tell with reasonable certainty whether it came from a specimen of the former Soviet Union biological weapons program,'' said Dean Wilkening, a physicist who directs a working group on biological terrorism at Stanford Univ.'s Ctr for Intl Security & Cooperation. To a lesser extent, typing the strain might allow investigators to trace it to a particular lab that stores & sells it.

American law strictly limits the distribution of pathogens from germ banks, but it took a series of frightening lapses for the govt to take notice. The new rules are only 5 years old. Congress acted in 1996 after the American Type Culture Collection, of Manassass, Va., compiled a frightening record of selling dangerous germs from its specimen collection to crackpots. In 1984, followers of Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh obtained salmonella from American Type and used it to sicken 700 patrons of 10 restaurants in The Dalles, Ore. In 1986, a time the U.S. was friendlier to Iraq than it is today, the Univ. of Baghdad purchased anthrax, along with strains of bacteria that cause botulism & brucellosis. And in 1995, an American white supremacist used phony letterhead to order three vials of bubonic plague bacteria for $240. He was caught. "It used to be easy enough to get, and presumably was available in other countries as well. Lots of people had it before ATCC tightened up,'' said Dr. Mac Griffiss, professor of lab medicine at the Veterans Affairs Medical Ctr in San Francisco. Griffiss said people should not jump to the conclusion that the anthrax cases are linked to 9.11.01. "There was a time not long ago when those of us in the academic world were very careful about opening mail,'' he said, referring to a letter-bomb campaign that spanned several years. "It turned out the person doing it (Unabomber Ted Kaczynski) was neither Muslim or Middle Eastern. There are crazies among us.''

In her book "Germs, Biological Weapons and America's Secret War,'' NYTimes reporter Judith Miller and colleagues Stephen Engelberg & Wm Broad detail the trade in biological specimens and the subsequent passage by Congress of tight restriction on pathogen sales. On Wed., Miller opened an envelope in her office containing white powder and a threatening note similar to that opened by Brokaw's assistant at NBC. Initial tests for anthrax in the Times incident are negative, as were tests of the letter to NBC. A second letter sent to NBC, with a New Jersey postmark, has tested positive for anthrax, officials said yesterday, as has a letter sent from Malaysia to a Microsoft office in Nevada.

Army questions scientist's motives for anthrax search   4.25.02   Steve Miller Frederick News-Post

Internal Army investigation of anthrax contamination outside a Ft Detrick lab is focusing on a scientist who discovered the spores by conducting unauthorized tests, an Army commander said Tuesday. Officials would not comment on what prompted the researcher to look for anthrax spores outside the lab. It also was disclosed Tuesday that over the weekend there was a brief scare the anthrax contamination may have spread to a Frederick laundry service contracted to clean scrub suits & towels used in Ft Detrick's germ warfare defense laboratories. The scare proved unfounded when extensive testing at the laundry facility did not detect anthrax, but the incident raised fears among laundry works and city & state officials.

At Fort Detrick, investigators are exploring "exact circumstances" that led the unidentified scientist to search for & find anthrax spores last week in a hallway outside the lab, in a nearby office and on top a locker in the men's changing room, said U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease commander Col. Edward Eitzen at Fort Detrick. The areas were decontaminated with a bleach solution and work resumed in that section of the laboratory complex Monday. The anthrax was from a vaccine strain and was not considered dangerous. Col. Eitzen said it was unusual for a scientist to independently test areas outside the contained germ warfare defense labs. "I would not want to speculate on his motives for doing that," Col. Eitzen told reporters Tue. morning at news conference at Frederick City Hall hosted by Mayor Jennifer Dougherty. Col. Eitzen was not even aware the scientist had performed the tests early last week until after the samples came back late Thursday positive for anthrax, he said.

The scientist's actions prompted Maj. Gen. Lester Martinez-Lopez, the fort commander, to order the internal investigation, Col. Eitzen said. "One of the things we have learned is that we can probably improve our internal policies & procedures" for keeping dangerous substances contained in the labs, he said. The anthrax discovered last week was the first case in USAMRIID's history where potentially dangerous substances escaped from one of the tightly sealed labs, Col. Eitzen said.
[ As opposed to the less than tightly sealed labs & depots documented to leak like sieves. The only first here is the admission of incident, not its occurrance ]
A source familiar with the preliminary investigation said one theory is that a lab worker carried an anthrax-tainted towel from the lab, through the decontamination shower and into the men's changing room. The towel may have been placed on top of the locker and the anthrax spores spread from there. A former USAMRIID researcher said incidents of contamination outside the labs were unheard of, but it was "very strange" for a biological agent to reach the top of a locker in a changing room. "Somebody got sloppy," he said.

The anthrax spores found outside the lab were from a vaccine strain used to protect researchers from contracting anthrax. The strain does not cause the disease in humans. Col. Eitzen said there was no link between the anthrax found outside the lab and the mutant anthrax strain 2 scientists were exposed to April 8 inside a lab. They were different strains. The mutant strain was being compared to that used in the anthrax attacks in Washington earlier this year. Col. Eitzen said he did not expect a match, since samples from the anthrax letters sent to Sen. Thomas Daschle D-SD and Sen. Patrick Leahy D-VT were stored elsewhere in the laboratory complex.

At the mayor's news conference, Ms. Dougherty and Delegate Sue Hecht, D-Frederick/Washington, criticized the Army's handling of the anthrax scare at the South Market St laundry facility. Ms. Hecht faulted Ft Detrick officials for waiting more than 24 hours to test for anthrax at Jeanne Bussard Ctr, Frederick nonprofit education & employment service for the disabled operating the laundry service. "Somehow the communication was not what it should have been," Ms. Hecht said at the news conference. More "checks & balances" need to be in place to keep elected officials & the public informed of possible dangers emanating from the post, she said. She complained of learning of the scare at Jeanne Bussard from a rumor. "Something broke down," Ms. Hecht said. "I don't want to find out from a rumor." Since taking office in January, Ms. Dougherty has pressed Ft Detrick officials to better communicate with City Hall. She said Tuesday that they had improved the lines of communication, but more timely information in cases like the laundry scare was needed to combat rumors.Ms. Dougherty promised to continue to pressure the Army to keep the public informed about activity at the base. "We'll keep their feet to the fire," she said.

Col. Eitzen said Ft Detrick wants to work closely with City Hall & the Frederick community. "Our goal is the same as the mayor & the delegate's," he said. Extensive tests by the U.S. Army Ctr for Health Promotion & Preventative Medicine did not detect anthrax contamination at Jeanne Bussard Ctr. The scrub suits & towels from USAMRIID are decontaminated in a high-heat autoclave before being handled by laundry workers and transported to Jeanne Bussard. The risk of anthrax exposure through the laundry was low, but the testing was performed as a precaution and to reassure the public, Col. Eitzen said. Army scientists tested 32 sites at the laundry facility, including washing machines, counter tops, handrails, laundry bags, the loading dock and in delivery trucks, said Jeanne Bussard Ctr exec. dir. Jeanne Dalaba.
Ms. Dalaba was out of town Friday and attempts by Ft Detrick officials to reach her were unsuccessful. By the time the Army got in touch with her Saturday, Ms. Dalaba had already hired a private laboratory to test the facility for anthrax, she said. Later that day, Army scientists conducted their own tests and the Army agreed to pay the $10,000 bill from the private tests, Ms. Dalaba said. "I don't care about the political stuff," she said. "I just want to keep my people safe."

Threat of contamination at the laundry facility and the ordeal of undergoing testing & medical treatment frightened some of the center's workers. "I think I was a little bit scared. I thought something might put us in the hospital," said Gerald Fly. He was one of the center's client/workers handling laundry Friday at USAMRIID and tested for anthrax exposure. "I didn't know what was going to happen," he said. About 100 workers were evacuated Friday from the areas where anthrax was found. About 42 people were tested for anthrax exposure and given antibiotic treatment, including 7 laundry handlers from Jeanne Bussard. None tested positive for anthrax exposure, Mr. Eitzen said.

Anthrax reappears at Connecticut site
Positive test not evidence of new terrorist attack
4.25.02   Robt Bazell, Alex Johnson MSNBC & AP NBC News

The same facility had been tested 6 previous times in Nov. & Dec. after death of Ottilie Lundgren, 94, of Oxford, who died of the inhalation form of anthrax. Positive samples came from the ceiling over 3 sorting machines that originally tested positive last autumn. They were believed to have been contaminated by mail that came into contact with anthrax-laced letters addressed to Sen. Tom Daschle D-SD & Patrick Leahy D-VT in Washington, the newspaper said.

Meanwhile, additional testing at Ft Detrick, MD Army laboratory, found no new areas of dangerous contamination, a post spokesman said. Sampling conducted last week after accidental leak of anthrax spores was discovered, did find a type of anthrax spores that cannot cause the disease, said spokesman Chuck F. Dasey. Affected areas, an office & hall adjoining the lab, were temporarily closed and disinfected with a bleach solution, he said Wednesday. The spill was discovered 4.8.02 at e Army Medical Research Inst. of Infectious Diseases, military's germ warfare defense lab. An unidentified civilian scientist, one of 2 workers in the area, tested positive for exposure to anthrax spores. Both workers were placed on antibiotics, although they had been vaccinated earlier against the disease and probably were not in danger. They have continued to work.

"primary direction of the investigation is
  turned inward" toward domestic terrorists ¹
1.13.02   Homeland Security Dir. Thos. Ridge ¹

Analysis of the anthrax attacks
Barbara H. Rosenberg Fed.Amer.Scientists
cit. 2.8.02 Salon magazine Laura Rozen

There was only one week between Sept 11 & Sept 18, when the first two letters (and probably another letter, never found, to AMI) were postmarked. This suggests that the anthrax was already in hand, and the attack largely planned, before Sept 11. A classified report dated February, 1999 discusses responses to an anthrax attack through the mail. The report, precipitated by a series of false anthrax mailings, was written by William Patrick, inventor of the US weaponization process, under a CIA contract to SAIC.

Even if the perpetrator did not make the anthrax himself, just filling the letters with it was a dangerous operation. The perpetrator therefore must have received the anthrax vaccine recently (it requires a yearly booster shot). The vaccine is in short supply and is not generally accessible, and vaccination records are undoubtedly available. The perpetrator also appears to have special Although the strain itself came into the possession of USAMRIID in 1981, and was distributed from there for research purposes to about 20 labs, only about four facilities in the U.S. are believed to have the capability for "weaponizing" dry anthrax, which basically means refining or cultivating a pure sample whose spores are so tiny and uniform they can easily be inhaled into the lungs. expertise in evading contamination while handling weaponized anthrax.

Perhaps the perpetrator stood to gain in some way from increased funding and recognition for biodefense programs. Many experts are still angry that the U.S. walked out of the Biological Weapons Convention conference this past July in Geneva, after the Bush administration rejected language that would have subjected signatory nations, including the U.S., to inspections to make sure they're not engaging in any prohibited offensive bioweapons development. "They [U.S. govt officials] don't want the treaty to be tighter, and they don't want people coming here and investigating our facilities and stockpiles," says Meryl Nass, an MIT-trained physician who has long advocated for stricter arms control. "So it turns out that the U.S. did have this dry weaponized anthrax after all, and that was a big secret. But no one has really discussed the implications of this. They completely avoided the issue. But the rest of the biodefense establishment around the world knew exactly what it meant. They knew the U.S. had basically transgressed the weapons convention."

On 9.4.01, a week before 9.11.01 attacks, Times reported that from 1997-2000, the CIA conducted a program called Clear Vision, to build a model of a Soviet germ bomblet. The program was carried out at the West Jefferson, OH, labs of Battelle Memorial Institute, defense & CIA contractor. In addition, the Times story reported, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Pentagon's intelligence arm, hired Battelle last year to create a type of genetically enhanced version of anthrax, a "superbug," to see if the anthrax vaccine currently in use by the Pentagon was effective against it. A second Pentagon program, called Bacchus, involved building a germ factory in the Nevada desert from scratch, but reportedly did not use real germs, but simulants that mimic their dispersal.

Wash.DC   More scientists came to the defense on Friday of a Texas researcher charged with a range of crimes after he reported he lost some plague samples, accusing prosecutors of blowing the case out of proportion. Texas Tech University medicine prof. Dr. Thomas Butler, 62, in Lubbock, pleaded not guilty earlier this month to a 69-count indictment.
New York Academy of Sciences said it had written in protest to U.S. Atty Gen Ashcroft, joining the National Academy of Sciences in expressing fears that overzealous anti-terrorist efforts could stifle scientific inquiry. "While technical violations may have occurred, Dr. Butler's colleagues are concerned that law enforcement officers appear to have blown the whole episode out of proportion to make an example of Dr. Butler and that the early local media coverage sensationalized the situation," said the letter from the Academy's Committee on the Human Rights of Scientists.

Butler admitted last January he was behind a scare that led to a widescale anti-terrorism investigation. He said he had accidentally destroyed 30 vials containing plague bacteria without filing the proper paperwork. For about a day media reports suggested the vials were missing and perhaps stolen.
Butler was arrested on suspicion of making false statements to federal investigators and FBI agents said Butler had given them a written confession. The FBI later said all the missing vials had been accounted for and the incident posed no danger to the public.

New York Academy committee, credited for helping pressure the former Soviet Union into releasing physicist Andrei Sakharov, said Butler was being treated unfairly. "We find extremely troublesome the "piling on" of "Theft," "Embezzlement," "Fraud," "Smuggling," and "False Tax Return" charges in the original and superseding indictments," they wrote. "The unavoidable impression here is that, if there is no substance to govt's threshold claim of false statement to the FBI, govt is nevertheless determined to obtain a conviction of Dr. Butler on something, indeed, anything."

Appeals court reinstates former scientist's libel lawsuit against N.Y. Times
7.28.05   Matthew Barakat AP

McLean VA   A federal appeals court has reinstated a libel suit against the New York Times filed by a former Army scientist who claims one of the paper's columnists unfairly linked him to the deadly anthrax mailings in 2001. Steven Hatfill sued the Times for a series of columns written by Nicholas Kristof that faulted the FBI for failing to thoroughly investigate Hatfill for the anthrax mailings that left 5 people dead.
The initial columns identified Hatfill only as "Mr. Z," but subsequent columns named him after Hatfill stepped forward to deny any role in the killings. Federal authorities labeled Hatfill "a person of interest" in their investigation.

Last year, a federal judge tossed out Hatfill's lawsuit, ruling that the columns did not defame Hatfill and accurately reflected the state of the FBI's investigation. But the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond overturned the rule Thursday on a 2-1 vote, saying that Kristof's columns, taken as a whole, might be considered defamatory.
"A reasonable reader of Kristof's columns likely would conclude that Hatfill was responsible for the anthrax mailings," wrote Judge Dennis Shedd in an opinion joined by Chief Judge William Wilkins. The ruling sends the case back to U.S. District Court in Alexandria for trial.
Thomas Connolly, a lawyer for Hatfill, said that "Dr. Hatfill is pleased with the ruling and looking forward to his day in court." A physician and bioterrorism expert, Hatfill worked in the late 1990s at the Army's infectious disease laboratory at Ft Detrick, MD.

Toby Usnik, a spokesman for the Times, said the newspaper was disappointed with the decision, "but we remain confident in our case. Mr. Kristof's columns were fair and accurate, and we continue to believe that newspapers need to be able to comment on how investigations, especially one as important as this, are being conducted."
Thursday's ruling acknowledged that Kristof's columns included assertions that Hatfill enjoys a presumption of innocence. But Kristof also included charges that Hatfill failed polygraph examinations, that bloodhounds responded to Hatfill and his apartment, and that Hatfill was a prime suspect within the biodefense community itself.
"In describing all this evidence, Kristof's columns did not merely report others' suspicions of Hatfill; they actually generated suspicion by asserting facts that tend to implicate him in the anthrax murders," the ruling said.

The ruling disputed the lower court judge's assertion that the articles accurately reflected the state of the government's investigation, saying there is no evidence thus far to determine whether the columns were in sync with the FBI probe.
Circuit Judge Paul Niemeyer dissented from the decision. "Nowhere does any column accuse Dr. Hatfill of committing the murders," he wrote. "The columns' purpose was to put into operation prosecutorial machinery that would determine whether Dr. Hatfill committed the crimes."
Hatfill also has filed a defamation suit against former Atty General John Ashcroft and other govt authorities. The suit is awaiting trial.

Princeton Borough   An advocate for the control of biological weapons who has been gathering information about last autumn's anthrax attacks said yesterday the FBI has a strong hunch about who mailed the deadly letters. But the FBI might be "dragging its feet" in pressing charges because the suspect is a former govt scientist familiar with "secret activities that the govt would not like to see disclosed," said Fed. of American Scientists' Chemical & Biological Weapons Pgm dir. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg.
Rosenberg, who spoke to about 65 students, faculty members and others at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and Intl Affairs at Princeton University, said the FBI has known of the suspect since Oct. and, according to her "govt insider" sources, has interrogated him more than once.

The investigation into 5 anthrax-laced letters and several other hoax letters, all mailed last fall, incl several processed by Trenton Main Post Office in Hamilton, was the focus of Rosenberg's talk. She also gave her thoughts about what the govt should do to control biological weapons. "There are a number of insiders, govt insiders, who know people in the anthrax field who have a common suspect," Rosenberg said. "The FBI has questioned that person more than once, … so it looks as though the FBI is taking that person very seriously." She said it is quite possible the suspect is a scientist who formerly worked at the U.S. govt's military laboratory at Ft Detrick, MD.

Rosenberg said she has been gathering information from press reports, congressional hearings, Bush administration news conferences and govt insiders she would not name. During a brief question-&- answer session after her talk, one man wondered whether biological agents truly pose significant dangers to the public, given the limited number of deaths & illnesses caused by five anthrax-laced letters. Without mentioning other biological agents that are far more deadly & contagious than anthrax, Rosenberg said the potential for a biological attack is "catastrophic."
Another man wondered if the FBI & other investigators might be focusing too narrowly on one scientist, saying, "New Jersey is the epicenter of the intl pharmaceutical industry," and many people in those labs presumably have the skills to handle & refine anthrax.

"I think your argument would have been a good one earlier on, but I think that the results of the analyses (of the letters & the anthrax in them) show that access to classified information was essential," Rosenberg said. "And that rules out most of the people in the pharmaceutical industry. … It's possible, but they would have had to have access to the information," Rosenberg said. Picking up the conversational thread, another man said, "People know a lot, and it's a question of what they choose to focus their knowledge on. Things are invented in parallel," he said.

She said the evidence points to a person who has experience handling anthrax; who has been vaccinated and has received annual booster shots; and who had access to classified govt information about how to chemically treat the bacterial spores to keep them from clumping together, which allows them to remain airborne. "We can draw a likely portrait of the perpetrator as a former Ft Detrick scientist now working for a contractor in the Washington, D.C., area," Rosenberg said. "He had reason for travel to Florida, New Jersey & the United Kingdom. … There is also the likelihood the perpetrator made the anthrax himself. He grew it, probably on a solid medium and weaponized it at a private location where he had accumulated the equipment & the material.
"We know that the FBI is looking at this person, and it's likely that he participated in the past in secret activities that the govt would not like to see disclosed," Rosenberg said. "And this raises the question of whether the FBI may be dragging its feet somewhat and may not be so anxious to bring to public light the person who did this.

"I know that there are insiders, working for the govt, who know this person and who are worried that it could happen that some kind of quiet deal is made that he just disappears from view," Rosenberg said. "This, I think, would be a really serious outcome that would send a message to other potential terrorists, that (they) would think they could get away with it. "So I hope that doesn't happen, and that is my motivation to continue to follow this and to try to encourage press coverage and pressure on the FBI to follow up & publicly prosecute the perpetrator."
She expressed disappointment that the U.S. govt last July decided against signing an intl biological weapons treaty that would ban nations from developing such weapons. "It became clear from congressional testimony that the reason for this rejection was the need to protect our secret projects," Rosenberg said.

During the question-& answer period, one woman said, "I'm not sure that I understood you completely, but it seems to me that the U.S. govt has a double-standard," of wanting other nations to comply with a weapons ban but wanting freedom to pursue its own program. "I'm totally shocked by this information," she said, sending a wave of laughter through the lecture hall. "They make no bones about it," Rosenberg replied. "On many occasions they've argued that rules should be for the bad guys, not the good guys."

Rosenberg said she worries about an "enormous increase" in money in the Bush budget for research into bioterrorism agents. "There is already a rush for this funding," she said. The number of researchers & labs ought to be tightly controlled, she said. Under the current budget proposal, however, she says the govt will be spreading money around to "a lot more people and a lot more laboratories around the country from which bioterrorists can emerge, as one just did. "By spreading around this access & this knowledge, we're asking for trouble.'

Bush's smallpox boondoggle
1.28.03   Maria Tomchick, ed. AlterNet

Geneva   A scientist funded by U.S. govt has deliberately created an extremely deadly form of mousepox, a relative of the smallpox virus, through genetic engineering. The new virus kills all mice even if they have been given antiviral drugs as well as a vaccine that would normally protect them. The work has not stopped there. The cowpox virus, which infects a range of animals including humans, has been genetically altered in a similar way.
The new virus, which is about to be tested on animals, should be lethal only to mice, Univ. of St. Louis' Mark Buller told New Scientist. He says his work is necessary to explore what bioterrorists might do. But the research brings closer the prospect of pox viruses that cause only mild infections in humans being turned into diseases lethal even to people who have been vaccinated.

Vaccines are currently our main defence against smallpox & its relatives, such as the monkeypox that reached U.S. this year. Some researchers think the latest research is risky & unnecessary. "I have great concern about doing this in a pox virus that can cross species," said Australian National Univ. in Canberra Ian Ramshaw on being told of Buller's work. Ramshaw was a member of the team that accidentally discovered how to make mousepox more deadly (New Scientist 1.13.01). But the modified mousepox his team created was not as deadly as Buller's.

Since then, Ramshaw told New Scientist, his team has also created more deadly forms of mousepox, and has used the same method to engineer a more deadly rabbitpox virus. But this research revealed that the modified pox viruses are not contagious, he says. That is good news in the sense that these viruses could not cause ecological havoc by wiping out mouse or rabbit populations around the world if they escaped from a lab.
However, this discovery also means some bioterrorists might be more tempted to use the same trick to modify a pox virus that infects humans. Such a disease, like anthrax, would infect only those directly exposed to it. It would not spread around the world and rebound on the attackers. But there is no guarantee that other pox viruses modified in a similar way would also be non-contagious.

Ramshaw's team made its initial discovery while developing contraceptive vaccines for sterilising mice & rabbits without killing them. The researchers modified the mousepox virus by adding a gene for a natural immunosuppressant called IL-4, expecting this would boost antibody production.
Instead, the modified mousepox virus was far more lethal, killing 60% of vaccinated mice. The addition of IL-4 seems to switch off a key part of the immune system called the cell-mediated response.

Now Buller has engineered a mousepox strain that kills 100% of vaccinated mice, even when they were also treated with the antiviral drug cidofovir. A monoclonal antibody that mops up IL-4 did save some, however. His team "optimised" the virus by placing the IL-4 gene in a different part of the viral genome and adding a promoter sequence to maximise production of the IL-4 protein, he told a biosecurity conference in Geneva last week.
Buller has also constructed a cowpox virus containing the mouse IL-4 gene, which is about to be tested on mice at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft Detrick, MD.

Cowpox infects people, but Buller says the IL-4 protein is species-specific and would not affect the human immune system. The experiments are being done at the second-highest level of biological containment. Ramshaw says there is no reason to do the cowpox experiments, as his group's work on rabbits has already shown the method works for other pox viruses.
While viruses containing mouse IL-4 should not be lethal to humans, recombinant viruses can have unexpected effects, he says. "You'd hope the combination remains mouse-specific." Why his group's engineered viruses are not contagious is a mystery, he says. It is not, for instance, because the host dies faster than usual, taking the virus with it. But his findings could explain why pox viruses containing IL-4 have never evolved naturally, even though the viruses frequently pick up genes that affect their host's immunity.

Despite the concerns, work on lethal new pox viruses seems likely to continue in the U.S. When members of the audience in Geneva questioned the need for such experiments, an American voice in the back boomed out: "Nine- eleven". There were murmurs of agreement.

Killer virus
1.10.01   Rachel Nowak New Scientist

Melbourne   … Australian researchers had no intention of producing a killer virus. They were merely trying to make a mouse contraceptive vaccine for pest control. "But it's a good way to show how to alter smallpox to make it more virulent," says Ken Alibek, former second-in-command of the civilian branch of the Soviet germ-warfare program.
… Alibek, who now works on developing novel treatments for anthrax for the defence contractor Hadron in Virginia, says this highlights the drawback of working on vaccines against bioweapons rather than treatments. "I'd say any vaccine could be overcome by one or another genetically engineered virus or bacterium," he says.

… Defence experts are also worried about preserving the freedom to publish medical findings while trying to stop the information falling into the wrong hands. According to former U.S. presidential adviser and Johns Hopkins Univ. Ctr for Civilian Biodefense Studies dir. D. A. Henderson in Baltimore, what are effectively blueprints for making microorganisms more harmful regularly appear in unclassified journals. "I can't for the life of me figure out how we are going to deal with this," he says.
The Australian researchers consulted their country's Dept of Defence before submitting the work for publication, and only decided to go ahead after considerable thought. A report will appear in a Feb. issue of the Journal of Virology. "We wanted to warn the general population that this potentially dangerous technology is available," says Jackson. "We wanted to make it clear to the scientific community that they should be careful, that it is not too difficult to create severe organisms."

In CT, only 4 people showed up to get the shot, and 3 of those were administrative personnel, the state epidemiologist & 2 administrators at Univ. of Connecticut's Health Ctr. The numbers willing to volunteer for the shots had been dwindling all week, as hospital associations, nursing unions, and other professional groups balked at the risk of the smallpox vaccine itself and raised important questions about the true potential for a smallpox terrorist attack.
At last count, more than 80 hospitals around the nation, incl major teaching hospitals & medical ctrs in urban areas, have opted out of the vaccination program.

The smallpox vaccine is made from live virus vaccinia or cow pox, cousin of smallpox. It can cause illness in a significant number of vaccine recipients. Experts est. 1,000 out of every 1 million who receive the vaccine will experience serious side effects, about 40 of those will be life-threatening illnesses, and 1 or 2 of those people will die from it. So, of the 10 million expected to get the shots, 10,000 are expected to get sick, 400 will be threatened with death, and 20 are expected to die outright from the vaccine alone.
But, as critics have pointed out, this is a gross underestimate of the risks. People who are vaccinated carry an open wound in their arm, which sheds the live vaccinia virus for up to 3 weeks. Certain people who come in close contact with them can become quite ill. At particular risk are infants under a year old, pregnant women, elderly people, folks with eczema and skin disorders (who can absorb the disease through breaks in their skin, est. 7 to 20% of the general population has had such skin disorders) and, most ominously, people with lowered immune system response.

Est. 60 million people in U.S. today living with weakened immune systems, most suffering from HIV/AIDS or undergoing medical treatment that didn't exist 35 years ago when smallpox vaccinations were routine. People with AIDS, cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy or radiation treatments, burn patients, and organ donor recipients would all be put at an unacceptably high risk of death if their nurses & doctors are vaccinated for smallpox.
Vanderbilt Univ. Medical Ctr (Nashville TN) preventive medicine head Wm Schaffner said: "The thing that stops you from doing this is the complexity of the smallpox vaccine, which is not a safe vaccine. There's a real disease that kills people unnecessarily: the flu. Mr. President, I would love to see you endorse a national flu vaccine campaign with the same vigor." Medical centers around the country, however, have had to deal with recent flu vaccine shortages. Smallpox is not high on their list of concerns.

Some officials caution smallpox attack is a real possibility. All it would take is one person to infect himself, travel to a major metropolitan area's crowded public place to begin infecting people, they argue. Problems with this scenario incl that smallpox has effectively been eradicated, with no new cases reported since 1977. Only known laboratory stocks of the disease exist in highly quarantined labs in the U.S. & Russia.
If smallpox cultures were smuggled out of Russia or the U.S., it's not at all certain that terrorist groups could get their hands on them or turn them into a usable weapon.

Even in lone, kamikaze, infected terrorist scenario, the outbreak might not be as bad as Bush administration advisors assume. Leading smallpox experts say now we have conditions less conducive to the massive outbreaks of the past, when people lived in extended families in crowded rooms, with multiple family members sharing the same bedrooms & beds. People wash their hands more and more people travel alone in cars and live in less crowded conditions. We use strong disinfectants more often, and air & water is filtered and treated for contaminants.

A realistic scenario of one person falling ill and then going through his or her day, even visiting a shopping mall & going to work, shows that only one or maybe two other people would be infected with smallpox before the sick person was sent to a hospital. In that kind of scenario, quarantine & area-specific vaccination would work well to contain the disease.
Joining critics of Bush smallpox vaccination plan is Ctrs for Disease Control former chief Bill Foege, National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine panel on bioterrorism preparedness consultant. Foege is global health adviser to the Bill & Melinda Gates Fdtn, which is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on major vaccination initiatives in Africa and helping to fund the search for an AIDS vaccine.

Foege is definitely not a foe of vaccination in general. In the 1960s, when he worked for the CDC in Africa, Foege developed a specific plan to vaccinate for smallpox that minimized the exposure to the vaccine and yet helped to wipe out the disease in that part of the world.
His method, called "ring vaccination," relies on a special property of the smallpox vaccine: it can protect people who've already been exposed to the disease if they're given the vaccine within 4 days of exposure to the disease. Foege argues that ring vaccination should be used in U.S.; other medical administrators are beginning to agree.

Univ. of Virginia Virginia Medical College internal medicine chair Richard Wenzel was faced with a crisis in the fall of 2001. During the height of the anthrax attacks, he received word that a patient with smallpox had been found and was being sent to his hospital. He quickly formulated a plan that would quarantine the patient and assign specific personnel to treat him who had been vaccinated as children. Wenzel located some smallpox vaccine for his hospital staff.

Agent Orange   USAF study


Agent Orange talks open in Vietnam
3.3.02   BBC

Fish diet
The conference is due to hear the findings of a US scientist who tested the blood of 43 people living near a former southern air base used as a depot for spraying the chemical. Univ. of Texas School of Public Health prof. Arnold Schecter says tests show people of Bien Hoa have high levels of dioxin, as high as 413 parts per trillion compared to a national average of just 2 parts. Prof. Schecter blames the contamination on the community's diet of fish, as dioxin is known to be stored in fatty tissues. It has been linked to cancer & birth defects.

Agent Orange hotspots located
12.30.01   Helen Sewell BBC

'Startling' results
It was when US veterans started to become ill with a variety of health problems that investigations suggested that Agent Orange could be involved. The most dangerous ingredient was the dioxin, a pollutant that stays in the environment for decades. There are still about 12 dioxin hotspots in Vietnam, in areas where very heavy spraying took place. Scientists from the U.S. have been working with the Vietnamese Red Cross in these areas, testing residents to see whether they are suffering any ill effects. Lead scientist Univ.TX prof. Arnold Schecter says they are "very startled" by the results.

Export worry
In a paper to be published in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine, he says that in Binh-Hoa, 95% of people sampled had elevated levels of dioxin in their bloodstream, and some had 200 times the average amount. Dioxins, which include TCDD and other related compounds, can cause cancers and problems with reproductive development, the nervous and immune systems. It is thought the high levels of dioxin found in Binh-Hoa residents result from the chemical leaching into watercourses where it is absorbed by fish and ducks, which form part of the Vietnamese diet. The issue is very sensitive for Vietnam, which exports these foods all over the world.

Why are so many of our soldiers sick?
6.30.02   Jim Kelly Sunday Times

Dr Judith Ford, who performed the tests, concluded the men had been exposed to unidentified toxic agents. What was worse, she said, the cellular damage might have planted a genetic time bomb in their children.

• Is enough known about dioxin? That is a question the powerful U.S. veterans' lobby wants answered.
• Is it possible to identify & clean up the affected sites? That is perhaps an uncomfortable question for Hanoi, which has had responsibility in the 25 years since the end of the war.
• And, the question most pressing for the victims: how can they be helped?