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Date sent: Sun, 21 Oct 2001 23:24:46 +1300
From: Misty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: SNET: The Soviet "biological Chernobyl," 1979 airborne anthrax
outbreak
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED],
Armageddon or New Age? <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS
Soviets' Silent Hysteria
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-000083582oct20.story?coll=
la%2Dheadlines%2Dfrontpage
A 1979 anthrax outbreak killed dozens. But unlike in the current scare,
there was little sign that anything was wrong. That's because officials
covered it up.
By MAURA REYNOLDS, TIMES STAFF WRITER
MOSCOW -- The deadliest anthrax outbreak on record began in silence and
killed quietly--both literally and figuratively.
Sometime on April 2, 1979, millions of anthrax spores began to spread across
southern sections of the Ural Mountains city known at the time as
Sverdlovsk. A meat-plant worker named Vasily Ivanov was out walking his dog.
The day shift at a ceramics factory was grinding sand and clay. In a little
more than a week, Ivanov was dead. So were 18 ceramics workers.
Rumors spread quickly of a deadly disease that wasted healthy men in a
matter of days. But there were no articles in the newspapers, no breathless
television reports, no government leaders urging calm. Except for workers
who suddenly started hosing down roofs and disinfecting streets, there was
little outward sign of trouble. But in the privacy of their homes, residents
were terror-stricken.
"The authorities may have believed they could prevent people from panicking
by not telling the truth," Ivanov's 42-year-old daughter, Alevtina
Nekrasova, recalled this week by telephone from her home in the city, which
has been renamed Yekaterinburg. "But people were in a panic anyway. Everyone
sat at home, with windows and doors shut tight, shivering with fear and
waiting for the first symptoms . . . to develop. We all thought we were
going to die."
In many ways, the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak--which killed at least 64
people and perhaps dozens more--was a looking-glass version of the current
anthrax scare around the world. The death toll was far higher, but the
public hysteria was lower. And it was futile to look to the federal
government for help because the malevolent force behind the outbreak was the
government itself.
"We lived next to a top-secret military compound," Nekrasova said. "Common
logic suggests that it could not have been anything but a biological weapon.
What other explanation can there be?"
The Sverdlovsk outbreak has been called a "biological Chernobyl," and just
like the more well-known 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine, Soviet officials'
first instinct was to cover it up. They managed to do just that, with
varying degrees of success, until after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
They probably assumed that a cover-up would be easy. After all, Sverdlovsk
was a grim, closed military city at the time, and a significant proportion
of its cautious and hard-working population was employed in defense-related
industries.
In its most common form, anthrax is primarily a disease of farm animals. And
for more than a decade, the official government explanation was that
Sverdlovsk residents had been sickened by eating meat from infected animals.
Officials apparently were unconcerned by the fact that it is fairly rare to
contract anthrax by eating tainted animal products. Most people who catch
the disease are farm or textile workers who absorb the bacteria through cuts
in the skin. Less commonly, a person can contract pulmonary anthrax by
inhaling the bacteria's spores.
All forms of anthrax are treatable with antibiotics such as penicillin if
caught in the earliest stages.
The Soviet government concocted the tainted-meat story to conceal what the
West already suspected: The Soviets were violating the 1972 Biological
Weapons Convention by producing anthrax. Indeed, they were manufacturing it
around the clock inside a top-secret facility in southern Sverdlovsk known
as Compound No. 19.
Boris N. Yeltsin, who was Sverdlovsk's Communist Party chief at the time of
the outbreak, acknowledged the truth in 1992, when he was Russia's
president: The anthrax had escaped from Compound No. 19. But he never
explained how.
In a 1999 book on the Soviet biological weapons program, "Biohazard," Ken
Alibek, the program's former deputy chief, recounts the explanation he
heard: A missing air filter was to blame. A clogged filter had been removed
during one shift, and workers had left a note for the incoming shift to
replace it, Alibek was told. The note went either missing or unheeded for
several hours before the mistake was caught.
The military didn't notify civilian authorities, much less the public.
Hospital officials were told only to be prepared for an outbreak of some
kind of infectious disease. For the most part, it was left for local public
health officials to figure out what to do.
One of those health officials was Faina Abramova. The morning that Vasily
Ivanov died, Abramova, the recently retired chief pathologist at City Clinic
No. 40, was called to examine the body of a man whose symptoms had
confounded her colleagues.
"All the soft brain tissues were permeated with blood," Abramova, 80,
recalled this week. "The pathologists who performed the initial autopsy
suggested it might have been some sort of a viral infection, like a form of
influenza. But in more than 30 years of work, I had never seen anything of
the kind happen to flu patients. What I was looking at was utterly
different."
Abramova had to consult a medical school textbook to come up with the
answer. "There were a lot of doctors in the autopsy room watching me
work--among them experts on infections," she said. "So I asked them bluntly
. . . 'Have any cases of anthrax been reported in Sverdlovsk?' "
The other doctors hemmed and hawed. "And all of a sudden, the administrator
of the infections ward admitted they had been ordered to allocate a special
ward for people with highly virulent diseases. Possibly anthrax."
Abramova and her colleagues immediately suspected a biological weapons leak.
None of the patients had skin lesions associated with cutaneous anthrax. All
of them had the pulmonary form of the disease. And all lived in the same
southeastern district of the city, which on April 2, 1979, was downwind of
Compound No. 19.
In the ensuing weeks, Abramova performed autopsies on 42 people who died of
anthrax. But her findings were not passed on to the families. Instead,
relatives received death certificates that listed diseases such as pneumonia
or influenza as the causes of death. Ivanov's certificate said he died of an
"unidentified poison."
Abramova doubted that tainted meat could have caused so many cases of
anthrax. But she was warned to keep her conclusions to herself.
The Soviet Union's top sanitary physician was part of a commission that
arrived from Moscow. Abramova said he told her: "Whatever you find and
whatever conclusion you draw, remember--the official version is 'meat.' "
Shortly thereafter, plainclothes men arrived at the hospital and confiscated
Abramova's reports and other materials relating to the outbreak.
"We do not know exactly who they were," she said, "but it's rather easy to
guess."
Meanwhile, doctors and nurses spread out in the district downwind of the
plant and started giving shots and antibiotics. Sometimes they were
accompanied by police. No one could offer an explanation.
After the deaths of the 18 workers at the ceramics factory less than two
miles from the compound, doctors showed up there with needles and pills.
"We were not told it was anthrax," recalled Nikolai Shigapov, chairman of
the factory trade union. "Doctors also prescribed tetracycline to all of us
as a precaution--they told us to swallow these pills by the pack: three
times a day, six pills at a time. No wonder a lot of people who never got
anthrax got kidney and liver problems instead. I, for instance, got a
serious liver problem that has remained uncured for the rest of my life."
He also came down with an illness; it took three weeks for him to recover.
He now believes that it was anthrax. "Doctors told me I must have gotten an
infection from meat," he said. "No one was diagnosed as having anthrax."
Everyone in the district was treated. Soon, the number of those falling ill
dropped off. In June 1979, Abramova autopsied her last victim.
It is still not clear how many people fell ill or died. The official count
of 64 deaths is widely believed to be a bare minimum. Other victims may have
been improperly diagnosed before Abramova completed the first autopsy.
Jeanne Guillemin, a sociology professor at Boston College whose book
"Anthrax" investigates the Sverdlovsk outbreak, believes that the military's
attempt to ignore the incident raised the death toll considerably. She notes
that it was only after Abramova's first autopsy--nine days after the
emission--that public officials had an inkling of what was wrong.
"If someone had taken responsibility and acknowledged there had been an
accident, they could have saved a good number of people," Guillemin said.
Some researchers suspect that the death toll was higher. They suggest that
employees at Compound No. 19, which had its own hospital, may have died
without their deaths being reported. In his book, Alibek says he was told
that the toll was 105.
The Sverdlovsk outbreak remains the only case of inhaled anthrax on record
in which multiple victims died of a weapons-quality strain. Biological
weapons experts who have studied the accident say it demonstrates some of
anthrax's strengths as a weapon. A small amount of anthrax--perhaps as
little as a gram--killed dozens. It also traveled far in Sverdlovsk, killing
farm animals more than 30 miles away.
But experts say it also demonstrates some of anthrax's limitations. The
killing power depends on wind speed and direction, as well as other factors.
For instance, the wind that morning in 1979 was brisk and blowing steadily
to the southeast, away from the city center. Those exposed were in a fairly
straight and narrow corridor. If the wind had been blowing in the opposite
direction, or more slowly to disperse the spores over a wider area, many
more might have died.
Considering that the city's population was 1.2 million, that thousands were
exposed and that the anthrax was weapons-grade, even 100 deaths might seem
fortunate.
Another lesson is that children appear to have some kind of higher immunity
to airborne anthrax, Guillemin says. For still unexplained reasons, no
children died in the outbreak even though many were outside playing when the
plume passed over. Also, curiously, only two of the known victims were
women.
Finally, the Sverdlovsk case suggests that once confirmed, anthrax outbreaks
can be contained. Martin Hugh-Jones, an anthrax expert at Louisiana State
University who has investigated the accident, says that although the public
health effort doesn't get high marks for openness, the Soviets did most
things right medically.
Regardless, it was not the facts of the case that kept a lid on public
hysteria in Sverdlovsk--it was political repression.
Information and emotion refract differently through a society ruled by a
repressive government and one saturated with instantaneous and sometimes
premature news reports. And terrorism thrives not on the number of deaths,
but on the public reaction.
"As a result of the anthrax mail campaign in the United States, there will
be only a few who actually contract anthrax and die," said Lev Grinberg,
chief pathologist of the now-renamed city. "But the main objective has
already been achieved--whoever sent those letters out has managed to strike
primordial fear into people's hearts."
*
Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times' Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.
For information about reprinting this article, go to
http://www.lats.com/rights/register.htm
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