- VICTORIA, British Columbia, Canada, March 30, 1998 (ENS) - Sergeant Mike
Kipling's refusal to line up for experimental anthrax shots in Kuwait last
week could see the Canadian Forces flight engineer court marshaled, stripped
of rank and locked in a stockade.
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- But just taking his anthrax pills had
already made him sick. And the experimental vaccine was not licensed for
use by Canadian health authorities. Was Kipling being paranoid or prescient
in his refusal to be another military guinea pig?
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- Whether inserted into a vaccine or a
warhead, this virulent cattle disease has proven tricky to control. Scotland's
Gruinard Island is still under quarantine following British anthrax experiments
during World War II. Thirty years later, an explosion at Sverdlovsk's secret
Microbiology and Virology Institute spread almost 10 kilograms of dry anthrax
spores over Boris Yeltsin's hometown, killing scores of Soviet citizens.
Pointing to US biowar efforts, AIDS expert Dr. Robert Gallo also notes
that "the anthrax building is contaminated and off-limits at Fort
Detrick."
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- Saddam's scientists had been weaponizing
anthrax since 1988, after 19 containers of anthrax were received at the
Salman Pak biowar complex near Baghdad. The White House approved shipments
were later identified by the U.S. defense department as a "major component"
in Iraq's biological warfare program. They had been sent by the American
Type Culture Collection, a company located just down the road from the
U.S. Army's germ warfare labs at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
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- Washington's hope was to help kill enough
Iranian conscripts to save Saddam's regime from losing an eight-year war
it had urged him to undertake. By 1990, U.S. intelligence estimated that
Salman Pak had produced at least a ton of anthrax, botulinum toxin and
another disease called clostridium perfringens.
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- Within a week of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait,
urgent classified messages from Fort Detrick warned U.S. commanders that
anthrax could infect wide areas if released by agricultural sprayers mounted
on Iraqi trucks. At least 25 al Hussein warheads were also tipped with
anthrax, botulinum, or aflatoxin.
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- At Tallil airfield in southern Iraq,
reconnaissance photos also showed SU-22 ground-attack jets equipped with
spray tanks capable of dousing allied troops with 2,000 liters of anthrax.
U.S. Department of Defence Intelligence reports reveal that the first wave
of anthrax attackers was shot down.
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- But on January 19, 1991, as SCUD missiles
spread a skin-burning yellow mist over the coalition centre at al Jubayl,
a single enemy aircraft was logged by Central Command "overhead at
time of explosion traveling at high rate of speed." The American radio
net soon reported anthrax in hundreds of dead sheep and camels outside
that Saudi city.
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- Just five days later, the U.S. Army's
513th Military Intelligence Brigade confirmed that King Khalid Military
City - another big coalition complex in Saudi Arabia - had been hit by
anthrax.
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- With this record of documented anthrax
attacks, there could be no doubt that Kipling and his cohorts faced further
biological mayhem. But their most immediate germ warfare threat came from
their own forces. Everyone had heard how tens of thousands of Americans,
Brits and Canadians had become ill during Desert Storm after taking experimental
anti-chemical warfare pills and at least 10 different vaccinations for
anthrax and other plagues - often in a single sitting.
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- Among surveyed Gulf War veterans, 43
percent said they became ill immediately after taking anthrax shots. Some
platoons saw half their members sicken from this vaccine-induced "Saudi
flu."
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- The anthrax inoculations given to 400
Canadian soldiers in Kuwait last month came from the same U.S. stockpiles.
As far back as 1990, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration expressed concern
about a vaccine that was then nearly 20 years old.
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- Hoping to boost its effectiveness in
time for Desert Storm, American medicos added an adjuvent called squalene
to the anthrax mix. Squalene is not approved for human use. After the war,
nearly three out of four anthrax-vaccinated GI's tested positive for squalene
antibodies.
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- "We found soldiers who never left
the United States but who got shots who are sick, and they have squalene
in their systems," reported an independent scientist hired by New
York's Insight magazine. "The sicker an individual, the higher the
level of antibodies for this [squalene] stuff."
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- Pamela Asa, a Tennessee immunologist
who first suggested the adjuvent angle to Gulf War Illness investigators
in 1995, says that autoimmune disorders from squalene vary from person
to person. "But it's still the same disease process, basically...neurological
disease."
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- This sounds scary enough to justify Kipling's
caution and defiance. But the anthrax vaccines administered to U.S. and
Canadian soldiers during the Gulf War were most likely also contaminated
by a sexually-transmissible bug called mycoplasma Fermentans.
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- Once injected into the bloodstream, this
microscopic bacteria can cause heart problems, organ failure and crippling
symptoms resembling rheumatoid arthritis.
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- In sworn Congressional testimony, leading
Gulf War Illness researchers Gath and Nancy Nicholson stated that, "With
reports of anthrax detected at KKMC in Saudi Arabia and other exposures
possibly by residue of bombings, anthrax in the sand, or anthrax in SCUD
missiles with airburst CBW warheads, it would appear that the anthrax vaccines
worked."
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- Unfortunately, the impecably-credentialled
microbiologists added, "there is no known vaccine against the m. Fermentans
that is present in anthrax preparations."
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- The Nicholsons testified that because
so many sick veterans had been vaccinated but never sent to the Gulf, the
mycoplasma Fermentans they were seeing in nearly half of their Gulf War
patients must have been injected into their veins through contaminated
anthrax vaccines.
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- It would not have been the first time.
In the spring of 1976, thousands of U.S. Marines and Air Force personnel
were injected with experimental mycoplasma vaccines. Many became sick with
autoimmune disorders resembling chronic fatigue syndrome or multiple sclerosis.
At least one volunteer later tested positive for both mycoplasma Fermentans
and anthrax.
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- Was Sergeant Kipling justified in refusing
to obey a direct order? A military court will decide.
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- {William Thomas is the author of Bringing
the War Home, a recently published book on the Gulf bio-war. The information
on military anthrax experiments by the British, Soviets and Americans comes
from his earlier book, Scorched Earth. Thomas' writing on the lingering
after-effects of the Gulf War have appeared on the Environment News Service,
in the Vancouver Sun, Globe & Mail, and the Toronto Star newspapers
as well as Ecodecision and Monday magazines. His award-winning Gulf War
footage has aired on the CBC, CNN, IKON (Holland) and NBC networks. He
can be reached at Email: [1]wilco@islandnet.com; Website: [2]http://www.islandnet.com/~wilco
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