--- Begin Message ---
>From Philadelphia Daily News,
http://dailynews.philly.com/content/daily_news/2001/11/09/local/GERM09C.htm
-
U.S. Army gassed the turnpike in '50s
Tuscarora Mountain tunnel on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, west of
Harrisburg, was one of two tunnels used by the Army to test the spread
of biological weapons in 1955
By RAMONA SMITH
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
HERE IS your nightmare:
The car is loaded. The family is on board. You're headed out the
Pennsylvania Turnpike west of Harrisburg, where the hills rise quickly
into rocky ground.
Suddenly, as you enter the second of a series of turnpike tunnels, you
drive straight into a fog that's loaded with billions of bacteria.
The cloud may look like exhaust fumes, or it may be invisible. You
have no way of knowing that a machine stationed at the tunnel entrance
is pumping a constant stream of germs into the air. Or that your car -
with the windows open - is carrying the germs through the tunnel with
you.
This nightmare release of bacteria on unsuspecting Americans actually
happened, thanks to the U.S. Army. Fortunately for travellers, the
rod-shaped bacteria pumped into two Pennysylvania Turnpike tunnels in
August 1955 were only a weak cousin of anthrax - not the deadly germ
that's caused havoc in the postal system over the past two months.
For two decades, from 1949 to 1969, the federal government conducted
biological warfare experiments without warning in locations stretching
from the New York City subway to San Francisco Bay. Instead of a
deadly germ, the Army used dust or bacteria that were thought at the
time to be harmless.
But some of the substances ultimately turned out to be not so harmless
after all - with one death and 10 additional cases of pneumonia or
related infections often blamed on a fog spewed over San Francisco in
1950.
"We had arsenals of biological weapons and we wanted to make sure that
they would work in case we used them," said Leonard A. Cole, a
political science professor at Rutgers University's Newark campus and
author of "The Eleventh Plague," a book on chemical and biological
warfare.
The United States - which now considers chemical and biological
warfare to be a tool fit only for terrorists - was once fully prepared
to use them, though they were never used.
* The Army ordered a million 4-pound bomblets that could be loaded
with anthrax and scattered from huge cluster bombs in 1944 - but
canceled the order at the end of World War II, according to an Army
textbook that deals with chemical and biological warfare. A more
recent generation of bio-weapons was destroyed in 1971-72.
* Huge tanks at an Army base in Maryland cultured real anthrax to be
stored in weapons - and batches of its look-alike cousin, Bacillus
globigii, to be used in weapons tests.
* The Army staged 239 open-air germ warfare tests - 27 in public
civilian areas and the rest on military bases - between 1949 and 1969,
officials acknowledged during Senate subcommittee hearings in 1977.
The clouds unleashed into both ends of the Kittatinny and Tuscarora
turnpike tunnels in Franklin County, Pa. were among those tests.
"It was done from a small generator, like an aerosol generator," says
Norm Covert, retired historian at Fort Detrick near Frederick, Md.,
the command and research center for chemical and biological warfare
testing. "The object was to see how quickly the organism was to flow
from one end of the tunnel to the other as the cars came through . . .
And it gets there pretty fast."
Equipment inside the tunnel collected air samples to show what
concentrations of bacteria travelled to the other end.
The people driving through the two tunnels didn't have a clue.
"They've got their car windows open, it's August, and most cars didn't
have air conditioning" in 1955, Covert said.
The experiment was intended to find out "what our vulnerability would
be if the enemy used this technique . . . And I think what we know
today is that we are extremely vulnerable to any attack" using
airborne bacteria, he said.
Instead of the deadly, rod-shaped anthrax (Bacillus antracis), Army
teams used stand-in bacteria with a similar ability to form spores
that can be carried by the air. In experiments elsewhere, they
sometimes used fluorescent dust that rode the wind.
The basically innocuous Bacillus globigii (BG) and a similar strain,
called Bacillus subtilis variant Niger, were used in experiments in
the turnpike tunnels and the New York subway.
BG was also released in Washington, D.C., at the Greyhound bus
terminal and what's now Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
"Bacillus globigii does not produce an anthrax-like disease," said
Mark Wheelis, a microbiologist and biological weapons historian at the
University of California at Davis. The microbe lacks the genetic
material that allows anthrax bacteria to produce toxins.
What happened in the turnpike tunnels, Covert said, was similar to
what happened later in the New York City subway at several underground
locations in 1966. "They dropped a light bulb filled with BG and the
train swept it along about ten blocks."
Although BG gets essentially a clean bill of health from many
biologists, some of the other materials used in tests elsewhere were
later recognized by the Army as potential health risks to "highly
susceptible persons."
Among them, according to the Army's "Textbook of Military Medicine":
* Serratia marcescens, a microbe sprayed over San Francisco, among
other communities, in the 1950s. In San Francisco, these bacteria
later became a prime suspect in 11 cases of pneumonia, including one
man who died."
* Aspergillus fumigatus, a fungus primarily African-Americans were
exposed to 1951, supposedly to find out if blacks were more
susceptible than others to infection.
* Zinc cadmium sulfide particles, sent on wind-borne journeys over San
Francisco and much of the Midwest in the 1950s, are now considered a
probable cancer-causing substance. Army experiments tracked the
fluorescent dust as far as 1,000 miles and "provided the first proof
that biological agents were indeed potential weapons of mass
destruction," says the Army text.
When many of the tests were disclosed to shocked senators during the
1977 hearings, then-U.S. Sen. Richard Schweiker, R-Pa., said it was
tough to come to grips with "the use of Americans as unwitting human
subjects for open-air germ warfare testing conducted . . . by
officials of their own government." *
--
Dan S
<PRE>Post to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] List
info: www.topica.com/lists/biowar
</PRE>
<PRE>==^================================================================
This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: <A HREF=" http://topica.com/u/?bz8Q0W.bAgsdR
">http://topica.com/u/?bz8Q0W.bAgsdR</A>
Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail!
<A HREF=" http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register
">http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register</A>
==^================================================================</PRE>
--- End Message ---
