Article Two Bioterrorism Risk May Be Overstated Fear of biological attack has stirred memories of the sinister history of the remote Scottish island of Gruinard, where an anthrax bomb was exploded during World War II.
Now dubbed "anthrax island," Gruinard was requisitioned by the British military for secret tests to find out the potential of anthrax weapons following fears that Germany was developing a biological warfare capability. Explosives testing with anthrax spores took place on the deserted island in the early 1940s, killing 50 sheep and leaving the island so contaminated it remained a no-go area for over 45 years. Constant spraying with a mixture of 280 tons of formaldehyde and 2,000 tons of sea water was needed before Gruinard was finally declared decontaminated in 1987. Even today, 60 years on, it remains largely uninhabited. The experiment did not persuade the British war cabinet to develop anthrax as a biological weapon, possibly because its use was too gruesome to contemplate, or possibly because the experiment showed the difficulties of delivering the agent with any accuracy or guarantee of effectiveness. There is no doubt that anthrax -- delivered in the right way -- is potentially a mass killer. A 1993 report by the US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment estimated that between 130,000 and 3 million deaths could follow the aerosol release of 100 kilograms of anthrax spores upwind of Washington, DC. However, a review published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 1999 by the US Working Group on Civilian BioDefense stated that most experts agree that: the manufacture of a lethal anthrax aerosol "is beyond the capacity of individuals or groups without access to advanced biotechnology." It points out that although the group responsible for releasing the nerve agent sarin in a subway station in Tokyo in 1995 dispersed aerosols of anthrax and botulism throughout Tokyo on at least eight occasions, for unclear reasons these attacks failed to produce illness. Paradoxically, it was the accidental, rather than offensive, aerosolized release of anthrax spores from a military microbiology facility in Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) in the former Soviet Union in 1979 which most clearly demonstrates the agent's lethal potential. Of 79 people reportedly infected, 68 died. Yet even this incident may offer some reassurance, given that the military facility reportedly employed 15,000 people and that a residential area housing many thousands more was exposed to the aerosol. Underlining the importance of early diagnosis, the JAMA article reported: The first evidence of a clandestine release of anthrax as a biological weapon most likely will be patients seeking medical treatment for symptoms of inhalational anthrax. The sudden appearance of a large number of patients in a city or region with an acute-onset flu-like illness and case fatality rates of 80% or more, with nearly half of all deaths occurring within 24 to 48 hours, is highly likely to be anthrax or pneumonic plague. It adds that vaccine supplies are limited and that even if vaccine were available, population-wide vaccination "would not be recommended at this time, given the costs and logistics of a large-scale vaccination program and the unlikely occurrence of a bioterrorist attack in any given community." The Journal of the American Medical Association 1999;281:1735-1745 _______________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.ca address at http://mail.yahoo.ca -- The silver-list is a moderated forum for discussion of colloidal silver. To join or quit silver-list or silver-digest send an e-mail message to: [email protected] -or- [email protected] with the word subscribe or unsubscribe in the SUBJECT line. To post, address your message to: [email protected] Silver-list archive: http://escribe.com/health/thesilverlist/index.html List maintainer: Mike Devour <[email protected]>
