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Same Strain of Anthrax, Which Probably Had Its Origins in a U.S. Government Lab,
Caused the Death of the Elderly Woman in Connecticut
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10854-2001Nov24.html
Deadly Anthrax Strain Leaves a Muddy Trail
By Steve Fainaru and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 25, 2001; Page A01
For more than a month, federal investigators have stalked the poisonous anthrax strain
used in the recent terrorist attacks. The search has led to culture collections and
research labs, to microbiologists and veterinarians, to anywhere and anyone who might
have come in contact with the Ames strain.
But with each new case, the mysteries surrounding the distribution of Ames are only
deepening. Once thought to be accessible to thousands of researchers, the strain now
appears to have circulated in only a small universe of laboratories. One of its main
distributors, according to scientists, was the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of
Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md., which used Ames to test vaccines
that could protect U.S. troops in case of a biological attack.
In following the trail, investigators have had to face the possibility that Ames may
have slipped through an informal network of scientists to Iraq, which sought the
strain from a British biodefense institute in 1988 but whose application was rejected
because of concerns that it would be used to manufacture biological weapons.
Understanding the distribution of the Ames strain may be critical to the government's
search for those behind the attacks that have killed five people, infected 13 others
anddisrupted the federal government. In the latest case, that of a 94-year-old
Connecticut woman who died Wednesday after contracting inhalation anthrax, federal
investigators said DNA testing showed that the bacteria was indistinguishable from the
strain that appeared in the attacks in Florida, Washington and New York.
Those attacks involved the Ames strain, a virulent anthrax bacteria named for the Iowa
city where it was originally isolated, according to an Oct. 25 statement from Tom
Ridge, the White House director of homeland security. But identifying the type of
anthrax from among the 89 known genetic strains has done little to clear up confusion
within the government and the scientific community over the history of the Ames
strain, how many scientists had access to it and how it might have circulated.
When the attacks began, there was speculation that thousands of labs might have had
access to Ames, but that number has been knocked down by anthrax experts. Philip C.
Hanna,a microbiologist at the University of Michigan, said: "I'd put it . . . between
10 and 24."
Paul Keim, who has done genetic mapping of anthrax strains at Northern Arizona
Universityand is reportedly assisting the FBI with the investigation, said he was
uncertain of the number of labs with Ames but described it as "a pretty small list"
that he thought was "very discoverable."
Only a few facts have been clearly established. The strain of Bacillus anthracis that
became known as Ames was first isolated decades ago from a diseased cow near Ames. A
natural or "wild" strain, Ames was recognized relatively early for its virulence and
for its ability to resist vaccines.
Scientists in America's biological weapons program chose a different strain, called
Vollum 1B, as the lethal ingredient in U.S. anthrax weaponsin the 1950s and 1960s. But
in the late 1970s, following the dismantling of the program by President Richard M.
Nixon, Fort Detrick's microbiologists turned to the Ames strain to develop and test
tougher anti-anthrax vaccines to protect against biological weapons being built in the
Soviet Union.
"There was a whole new interest because of what the Soviets were doing," said Joseph
V. Jemski, who ran animal experiments at Fort Detrick. "I remember we began working
with three strains: One from Colorado, another from Texas -- and Ames."
Fort Detrick's work established Ames as something of a gold standard, a hardy strain
that helps biologists gauge the effectiveness of potential vaccines and treatments.
Soon, other researchers also became interested in Ames, and Army scientists would help
them obtain it.
"We were all just doing science," said David R. Franz, a scientist at Fort Detrick in
the early 1980s and now vice president of the Chemical & Biological Defense Division
of the Southern Research Institute, recalling an era of scientific openness that
followed the secretive days of the bioweapons program. "Our biowarfare era was over,
and we were doing a lot of work with academia and studying the variant strains. Things
just weren't as tight as they became" after new federal security guidelines on
transfers went into effect in the late 1990s.
Biologists familiar with Ames identified USAMRIID as the strain's major distributor.
"USAMRIID is the one that handled most of the distribution of this strain," said Keim.
"Surely they would know" who received it.
Martin Hugh-Jones, an anthrax expert at Louisiana State University who maintains a
global database of anthrax outbreaks for the World Health Organization, concurred that
it was relatively simple in the past to obtain anthrax cultures from USAMRIID.
"They kept the stuff there, and if you needed a culture, you called up Art" -- Col.
Arthur Friedlander, USAMRIID's senior military research scientist, Hugh-Jones said.
In some cases, the bacteria delivered to researchers were genetically altered to
prevent their use as a weapon or make it less hazardous. Duke University researcher
Ken Wilson, for example, said he obtained the Ames strain from USAMRIID in the early
1990s but only after the organism had been stripped of its ability to produce deadly
toxins.
Other researchers received the bug in its virulent form. One such recipient was at
Fort Detrick's British counterpart, the Chemical Defense Establishment at Porton Down,
near Salisbury, England. Peter Turnbull, a former Porton Down microbiologist, said the
institute also was testing vaccines that would protect troops against various anthrax
strains.
British scientists in turn shared the Ames strain with other researchers. In the
mid-1990s, Porton Down sent a packet containing Ames spores to Hugh-Jones, and also to
a "very few" others, said Turnbull, who declined to name them.
"It wasn't random," said Turnbull. "We would know the other person's bona fides. It
was not spread around promiscuously."
Investigators are now hoping that retracing the movement of Ames will help lead them
to the person or group behind the anthrax mailings of September and October. Since
mid-October, FBI agents have visited universities, pharmaceutical laboratories,
hospitals and veterinary centers to find out who may have had access to the strain.
Some researchers, such as Louisiana State University's Hugh-Jones, have been
subpoenaed and questioned for hours about the possibility that Ames spores might have
been lost or stolen. Hugh-Jones said he has turned over laboratory documents to the
FBI and insisted his lab kept the Ames strain under tight control.
"Nobody got it from us; it stopped with us," he said.
In fact, some anthrax experts believe that it may be impossible to learn exactly how
many researchers have Ames. Genetic differences among anthrax strains are slight, and
until the advent of genetic typing in recent years, the labeling of strains was often
sloppy. It is possible that Ames bacteria ended up in many other laboratories, but
under a different name. Perhaps the strain even reached Iraq, or another state with a
biological weapons program, some scientists say.
"I don't think anyone had heard of [Ames] before we published our vaccine results" in
the 1980s, Turnbull, the former Porton Down scientist, said. "There doesn't appear to
be a history of the strain previous to this. Perhaps it existed as stock on a shelf
somewhere. Someone isolates a strain -- we believe in this case it was from a cow from
Ames, Iowa -- and it's labeled 'Iowa cow' and placed on a shelf somewhere."
Because of the imprecise labeling, some experts say that anthrax strains that were
widely distributed should be analyzed to see if they match genetically the strain used
in the attacks.
Of the seven strains sent to Iraq by the American Type Culture Collection in the late
1980s, for example, none was labeled "Ames." But Kimothy L. Smith, a member of Keim's
genetic analysis team that reportedly has been helping the FBI investigation, said he
did not believe that all the strains sent to Iraq had been studied and compared to
known varieties.
"It's a tower of Babel when it comes to nomenclature," said one scientist familiar
with the Iraqi shipments. "Much of what is out there in the biological world is not
well identified."
Given Iraq's interest in obtaining the Ames strain -- and given the lax controls over
pathogen movement in the past -- some experts are convinced that Baghdad has Ames.
"The probability that they don't have the strain is near zero," said a microbiologist
who has studied Ames.
But others are hopeful that the Ames microbes used in the attacks will turn up closer
to home, leaving a clear trail to the perpetrators.
"Basically, if some guy's got this culture on his dirty clothes or on his bench top,
he'll have some explaining to do," said Hugh-Jones. "It's like owning a pistol that
was used in a homicide."
Staff researchers Alice Crites, Bobbye Pratt and Mary Lou White contributed to this
report.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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