[Oman-L] Fw: U.S.admits to germ warfare (fwd)

[Franklin Wayne Poley]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 22:48:30 -0800
From: Henry Ayre <henri@alaska.net>

Subject: Fw: U.S.admits to germ warfare

Of Microbes and Mock Attacks: Years Ago, 
The Military Sprayed Germs on U.S. Cities...

U.S.admits to germ warfare
Yeah, well, are they giving it another go now?
...using anthrax, for instance?
Jim Carlton | Wall Street Journal | 10-22-01

From: M.O.M. <nox2128@blackfoot.net>
To: m.o.m. email alert list <mom-l@montana.com>
SAN FRANCISCO Thursday, October 25, 2001 4:26 PM– 

> Fifty-one years ago, Edward J. Nevin checked into a San
> Francisco hospital, complaining of chills, fever and general malaise.
> Three weeks later, the 75-year-old retired pipe fitter was dead, the
> victim of what doctors said was an infection of the bacterium Serratia
> marcescens.
> 
> Decades later, Mr. Nevin’s family learned what they believe was the
> cause of the infection, linked at the time to the hospitalizations of 10
> 
> other patients. In Senate subcommittee hearings in 1977, the U.S. Army
> revealed that weeks before Mr. Nevin sickened and died, the Army had
> staged a mock biological attack on San Francisco, secretly spraying the
> city with Serratia and other agents thought to be harmless.
> 
> The goal: to see what might happen in a real germ-warfare attack. The
> experiment, which involved blasting a bacterial fog over the entire
> 49-square-mile city from a Navy vessel offshore, was recorded with
> clinical nonchalance: "It was noted that a successful BW [biological
> warfare] attack on this area can be launched from the sea, and that
> effective dosages can be produced over relatively large areas," the Army
> wrote in its 1951 classified report on the experiment.
> 
> Now, with anthrax in the mail and fear mounting of further biological
> attacks, researchers are again looking back at the only other time this
> country faced the perils of germ warfare – albeit self-inflicted. In
> fact, much of what the Pentagon knows about the effects of bacterial
> attacks on cities came from those secret tests conducted on San
> Francisco and other American cities from the 1940s through the 1960s,
> experts say.
> 
> "We learned a lot about how vulnerable we are to biological attack from
> those tests," says Leonard Cole, adjunct professor of political science
> at Rutgers University in New Jersey and author of several books on
> bioterrorism. "I’m sure that’s one reason crop dusters were grounded
> after Sept. 11: The military knows how easy it is to disperse organisms
> that can affect people over huge areas."
> 
> In other tests in the 1950s, Army researchers dispersed Serratia on
> Panama City, Fla., and Key West, Fla., with no known illnesses
> resulting. They also released fluorescent compounds over Minnesota and
> other Midwestern states to see how far they would spread in the
> atmosphere. The particles of zinc-cadmium-sulfide – now a known
> cancer-causing agent – were detected more than 1,000 miles away in New
> York state, the Army told the Senate hearings, though no illnesses were
> ever attributed to them as a result.
> 
> Another bacterium, Bacillus globigii, never shown to be harmful to
> people, was released in San Francisco, while still others were tested on
> unwitting residents in New York, Washington, D.C., and along the
> Pennsylvania Turnpike, among other places, according to Army reports
> released during the 1977 hearings.
> 
> In New York, military researchers in 1966 spread Bacillus subtilis
> variant Niger, also believed to be harmless, in the subway system by
> dropping lightbulbs filled with the bacteria onto tracks in stations in
> midtown Manhattan. The bacteria were carried for miles throughout the
> subway system, leading Army officials to conclude in a January 1968
> report: "Similar covert attacks with a pathogenic [disease-causing]
> agent during peak traffic periods could be expected to expose large
> numbers of people to infection and subsequent illness or death."
> 
> Army officials also found widespread dispersal of bacteria in a May 1965
> secret release of Bacillus globigii at Washington’s National Airport and
> its Greyhound bus terminal, according to military reports released a few
> years after the Senate hearings. More than 130 passengers who had been
> exposed to the bacteria traveling to 39 cities in seven states in the
> two weeks following the mock attack.
> 
> The Army kept the biological-warfare tests secret until word of them was
> leaked to the press in the 1970s. Between 1949 and 1969, when President
> Nixon ordered the Pentagon’s biological weapons destroyed, open-air
> tests of biological agents were conducted 239 times, according to the
> Army’s testimony in 1977 before the Senate’s subcommittee on health. In
> 80 of those experiments, the Army said it used live bacteria that its
> researchers at the time thought were harmless, such as the Serratia that
> was showered on San Francisco. In the others, it used inert chemicals to
> simulate bacteria.
> 
> Several medical experts have since claimed that an untold number of
> people may have gotten sick as a result of the germ tests. These
> researchers say even benign agents can mutate into unpredictable
> pathogens once exposed to the elements.
> 
> "The possibility cannot be ruled out that peculiarities in wind
> conditions or ventilation systems in buildings might concentrate
> organisms, exposing people to high doses of bacteria," testified Stephen
> Weitzman of the State University of New York, in the 1977 Senate
> hearings.
> 
> For its part, the Army justified its experiments by noting concerns
> during World War II that U.S. cities might come under biological attack.
> 
> To prepare a response, the Army said, it had to test microbes on
> populated areas to learn how bacteria disperse.
> 
> "Release in and near cities, in real-world circumstances, were
> considered essential to the program, because the effect of a built-up
> area on a biological agent cloud was unknown," Edward A. Miller, the
> Army’s secretary for research and development at the time, told the
> subcommittee.
> 
> But in at least one case – the bacterial fogging of San Francisco – the
> research may have gone awry. Between Sept. 20 and Sept. 27 of 1950, a
> Navy mine-laying vessel cruised the San Francisco coast, spraying an
> aerosol cocktail of Serratia and Bacillus microbes – all believed to be
> safe – over the famously foggy city from giant hoses on deck, according
> to declassified Army reports. According to lawyers who have reviewed the
> reports, researchers added fluorescent particles of zinc-cadmium-sulfide
> to better measure the impact. Based on results from monitoring equipment
> at 43 locations around the city, the Army determined that San Francisco
> had received enough of a dose for nearly all of the city’s 800,000
> residents to inhale at least 5,000 of the particles.
> 
> Two weeks after the spraying, on Oct. 11, 1950, Mr. Nevin checked in to
> the Stanford Hospital in San Francisco with fever and other symptoms.
> Ten other men and women checked in to the same hospital – which has
> since been relocated to Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. – with
> similar complaints. Doctors noticed that all 11 had the same malady: a
> pneumonia caused by exposure to bacteria believed to be Serratia
> marcescens. Mr. Nevin died three weeks later. The others recovered.
> Doctors were so surprised by the outbreak that they reported it in a
> medical journal, oblivious at the time to the secret germ test.
> 
> After the Army disclosed the tests nearly three decades later, Mr.
> Nevin’s surviving family members filed suit against the federal
> government, alleging negligence. "My grandfather wouldn’t have died
> except for that, and it left my grandmother to go broke trying to pay
> his medical bills," says Mr. Nevin’s grandson, Edward J. Nevin III, a
> San Francisco attorney who filed the case in U.S. District Court here.
> 
> Army officials noted the pneumonia outbreak in their 1977 Senate
> testimony but said any link to their experiments was totally
> coincidental. No other hospitals reported similar outbreaks, the Army
> pointed out, and all 11 victims had urinary-tract infections following
> medical procedures, suggesting that the source of their infections lay
> inside the hospital.
> 
> The Nevin family appealed the suit all the way to the U.S. Supreme
> Court, which declined to overturn lower court judgments upholding the
> government’s immunity from lawsuits.
> 
> Today, the U.S. military is again patrolling San Francisco’s coastline,
> guarding against someone who might try to copy the Army tests of half a
> century ago. Local officials say such an attack is unlikely, given the
> logistical problems of blasting the city without Navy ships.
> 
> Partly as a result of Mr. Nevin’s death, says Lucien Canton, director of
> San Francisco’s emergency services, "one thing we now know is that it
> takes an awful lot of stuff to produce casualties, especially in a place
> like San Francisco that always has a stiff breeze."
> 
> ==^================================================================
> 
> Euro-Canadian News Service shares electronic information under fair use
> copyright provisions to individuals for their personal research and
enjoyment.
>