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BuzzFlash.com is sending you this article from the Baltimore Sun, which is one paper
that is actually RESEARCHING the anthax terrorist attacks, instead of reprinting
government spin.
http://www.sunspot.net/bal-te.md.detrick23dec23.story
Army harvested victims' blood to boost anthrax
Ex-scientists detail Detrick experiments
By Scott Shane
Sun Staff
December 23, 2001
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.
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.
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.
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.
The offensive bioweapons program was launched during World War II and ended by
President Richard M. Nixon in 1969.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
"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.
"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."
Surprised by his role
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.
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.
"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.
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."
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.
"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.
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.
Contradictory evidence
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.
"That's where Vollum 1B came from," said Patrick, of Frederick, who eventually headed
Detrick's product development division. "It's 1-Boyles."
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.
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.
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."
The cause of death was confirmed by an autopsy finding of bacteria resembling anthrax
in the brain.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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."
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.
"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."
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.
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.
"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.'"
Copyright © 2001, The Baltimore Sun
http://www.sunspot.net/bal-te.md.detrick23dec23.story
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