- In an attempt to make America's biological arsenal more
lethal during the Cold War, the Army collected anthrax from the bodies
or blood of workers at Fort Detrick who were accidentally infected with
the bacteria, veterans of the biowarfare program say.
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- The experiments, during the 1950s and '60s, were based
on long experience with animals showing that anthrax often becomes more
virulent after infecting an animal and growing in its body, according to
experts on the bacteria and scientific studies published at the
time.
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- Former Army scientists say the anthrax strain used to
make weapons was replaced at least once, and possibly three times, with
more potent anthrax that had grown in the workers' bodies. But some of
the key scientists who did the work more than four decades ago are dead,
and records are classified, contradictory or nonexistent, so it is
difficult
to establish with certainty the details of what happened.
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- The use of human accident victims to boost the killing
power of the nation's germ arsenal is a macabre footnote to a top-secret
program designed to destroy enemy troops with such exotic weapons as
botulism,
smallpox, plague and paralytic shellfish poison.
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- The offensive bioweapons program was launched during
World War II and ended by President Richard M. Nixon in 1969.
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- Today, after a few grams of mailed anthrax have killed
five people, sickened 13 others and disrupted the postal system and
government,
the old program's gruesome potential for destruction seems unimaginable.
But at the time, fearing correctly that the Soviet Union had an even larger
bioweapons program, Army scientists were driven to come up with more and
more lethal disease strains.
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- "Any deadly diseases, anywhere in the world, we'd
go and collect a sample," said Bill Walter, 76, who worked in the
weapons program from 1951 until it closed.
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- Walter was involved in anthrax production from selection
of seed stock to the dry, deadly spore powder ready to be loaded into a
bomb; his final job was as "principal investigator" in a lab
that studied anthrax and other powder weapons.
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- Walter believes the original weapons strain of anthrax,
a variety called Vollum after the British scientist who isolated it, was
upgraded with bacteria collected from three Detrick workers who were
accidentally
infected. Two of them died.
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- His recollection is supported by another veteran of the
anthrax program, 84-year-old James R.E. Smith. A third bioweapons veteran,
William C. Patrick III, confirms two of the cases but says he is not sure
about the third.
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- "Anthrax gets stronger as it goes through a human
host," said Walter, now retired in Florida. "So we got pulmonary
[lung] spores from Bill Boyles and Joel Willard. And finally we got it
from Lefty Kreh's finger."
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- William A. Boyles, a 46-year-old microbiologist, inhaled
anthrax spores on the job in 1951 and died a few days later. Seven years
after that, Joel E. Willard, 53, an electrician who worked in the
"hot"
areas where animals were dosed with deadly germs, died of the same
inhalational
form of the disease.
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- The third anthrax victim, Bernard "Lefty" Kreh,
was a plant operator who spent night shifts in a biohazard suit, breathing
air from a tube on the wall, using a kitchen spatula to scrape the anthrax
"mud" off the inside of a centrifuge. One day in the late '50s
or early '60s, his finger swelled to the size of a sausage with a
cutaneous,
or skin, anthrax infection.
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- Kreh went on to become a nationally known outdoors writer
and expert on fly fishing. He did not know that the bacteria that had put
him in Fort Detrick's hospital for a month had gone on to another life,
too - as a sub-strain of anthrax bearing his initials.
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- "We called it 'LK' - that's what we'd put on the
log sheets for each run," Walter said. A "run" was an
1,800-gallon
batch of anthrax mixture, grown in one of the 40-foot- high fermenters
inside Building 470, which stands empty at Detrick, its demolition
planned.
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- "Lefty's strain was rather easy to detect,"
Walter said. When a colony of bacteria grew on growth medium, he recalled,
"it came out like a little comma, perfectly spherical."
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- Surprised by his role
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- Orley R. Bourland Jr., 75, who worked as a plant manager,
said anthrax from Kreh's finger was isolated and designated
"BVK-1,"
for Bernard Victor Kreh.
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- Walter said he assumes the initials in the log sheets
were shortened by someone who knew the source of the new sub-strain of
anthrax never went by his formal name. Yet in the secret, compartmented
biological program, Kreh himself does not recall ever being informed of
the use to which his government put his illness.
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- "You're kidding," Kreh said. "I'll have
to tell my wife." He doesn't remember which finger it was, he said,
but he does remember that his wife, Evelyn, could see him only through
a glass barrier designed to keep any dangerous microbes contained during
treatment.
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- At 77, Kreh, who lives in Cockeysville, lives the full
life of a fishing celebrity, writing magazine articles, taking VIPs on
fly-fishing expeditions and endorsing products. A former outdoors columnist
for The Sun, he credits his 19 years at Fort Detrick with giving him time
to develop his expertise. Because of the rotating night-shift work, he
said, "Two out of three weeks I could hunt and fish all day
long."
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- The available evidence confirming the use of bacteria
from the two men who died, Boyles and Willard, is less complete. W. Irving
Jones Jr., 80, of Frederick, a biochemist, remembers his supervisor, Dr.
Ralph E. Lincoln, giving him an unusual request some months after the
electrician's
death.
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- "Dr. Lincoln had me pull a sample of Willard's dried
blood," Jones said. "We were able to grow [the anthrax bacteria]
right up. And it was deadly," a determination he made by testing it
on animals.
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- Jones said he cannot confirm the recollection of others
that Willard's sub-strain of anthrax was used for a new weapons strain.
That might well have happened, he said, if animal tests showed it to be
more virulent than the existing weapons strain, the only means of checking
potency at the time. But like any secret program, the Army's biowarfare
operation was run on a "need-to-know" basis, and weapons
development
was not his bailiwick, Jones said.
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- Contradictory evidence
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- The evidence on Boyles is contradictory. Patrick, who
joined the bioweapons program in 1951, the year the microbiologist died
of anthrax, said unequivocally that the Vollum weapons strain was altered
by passage through Boyles' body and became Vollum 1B.
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- "That's where Vollum 1B came from," said
Patrick,
of Frederick, who eventually headed Detrick's product development division.
"It's 1-Boyles."
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- A review of scientific papers on anthrax published by
Fort Detrick scientists in the 1940s and '50s offers indirect support for
Patrick's contention. The Vollum strain found in the early Detrick papers
is first replaced by a Vollum sub- strain called "M36," produced
by the British biological weapons program by passing the Vollum strain
through a series of monkeys to increase its virulence.
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- Then, in the late 1950s, references to the M36 variant
of Vollum give way to references to "the highly virulent Vollum 1B
strain." No 1A strain seems to have existed. Nor is there an
explanation
of the 1B sub-strain's origin - a break with the standard practice in
describing
sub-strains derived from passage through animals.
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- On the other hand, a medical report prepared by the Army
18 years after Boyles' death states that live anthrax bacteria "could
not be (and never was) cultivated from blood, sputum, nose and throat,
or skin at any time during the illness, not from tissue and fluids taken
at autopsy."
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- The cause of death was confirmed by an autopsy finding
of bacteria resembling anthrax in the brain.
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- The absence of live bacteria may have a simple
explanation.
Doctors say a person with inhalation anthrax who is given intravenous
antibiotics
might soon show no live bacteria, even though the person might still die
of toxin produced earlier by the bacteria. But if the medical report is
accurate, it appears to rule out the possibility that the weapons strain
included bacteria collected during or after Boyles' illness.
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- It is possible that after Boyles' death, blood taken
early in his illness was found to contain anthrax. Or, anthrax spores,
which are not killed by antibiotics, might have been found in his lungs
after death.
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- Scientists say it is possible, but not certain, that
one pass through a human host would boost the virulence of anthrax.
Repeated
passes through a particular species usually increase the bacteria's
lethality
toward that species, said David L. Huxsoll, who oversaw anthrax vaccine
tests as commander of the Army's biodefense center in the 1980s.
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- "If you pass it through a rabbit repeatedly, it
will kill rabbits, but it won't kill a cow," Huxsoll said. In humans,
"you could have a switch toward more virulence on one passage, but
it wouldn't necessarily happen."
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- Officials of the biological defense program at Fort
Detrick,
where Vollum 1B is still used to test vaccines, do not know of any
connection
to the accidental human infections, said Caree Vander Linden, spokeswoman
for the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. One account
passed down by a former staff member was that Vollum 1B was produced by
passage of the Vollum strain through rabbits, she said.
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- If the "B" actually stands for Boyles, it's
news to William Boyles' family. Natalie Boyles said Friday that her
husband,
Charles M. Boyles, William's son, had never heard of such a thing.
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- Kenneth E. Willard, Joel Willard's son, said the same.
"Shock would be my first feeling," Willard said on hearing the
evidence described in this article. "Second would be that my mother
or I should have been made aware of it, if it happened. We should have
been given more information all along."
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- But secrecy governed everything in the program, including
the deaths, because the American bioweapons makers had a keen awareness
of the threat from their counterparts in the Soviet Union, occasionally
supplemented by detailed information.
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- "We used to get intelligence reports telling me
what my Russian counterpart was doing," Walter said. "Our rate
and the Russian rate was the same - about 7 kilograms of dry anthrax a
week."
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- Another parallel exists. If the United States took
advantage
of tragic accidents to make its anthrax deadlier, those experiments were
mirrored at least once in the Soviet program. Far larger than the U.S.
effort, the Soviet biowarfare program was also secretly continued after
1972, when the nations signed a treaty banning such work.
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- According to Ken Alibek, a former deputy chief of the
Soviet program who defected to the United States in 1992, a scientist named
Nikolai Ustinov accidentally pricked himself while injecting a guinea pig
with Marburg virus in 1988. He died an agonizing death two weeks
later.
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- "No one needed to debate the next step," Alibek
wrote in his 1999 book Biohazard. "Orders went out immediately to
replace the old strain with the new, which was called, in a move the wry
Ustinov might have appreciated, 'Variant U.'"
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