Amerithrax (43 page)

Experiments on U.S. troops in Hawaii additionally used a hallucinogen developed as a chemical weapon. Uncounted numbers of civilians in Hawaii and Alaska were also un- aware they were being saturated with relatively mild bacteria meant to simulate anthrax germ weapons. And between 1932 and 1972, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study conducted by the federal government withheld medical treatment from poor, black men in Alabama for experimental purposes. The Tuskegee men were not told they had syphilis and were not treated for the illness, though penicillin had become avail- able. More than one hundred died from the disease and re- lated complications.

In the late 1960s, twenty-two microorganisms were under

study and there were plans to weaponize hemorrhagic fevers such as the Machupo virus and Rift Valley fever. Toward the end of the decade, public anger over biological and chemical arms brought pickets every day to Fort Detrick, Maryland.

The Institute’s scientists were looking into possibilities presented by genetic engineering when their program was dealt a fatal blow. Twenty-five years after a presidential ad- visory board launched America’s experiment with biological warfare, a panel appointed by President Nixon recom- mended killing it. The tests were abandoned in 1970.

In September 1990, Fort Detrick conducted its most am- bitious “defensive” anthrax experiment. An anesthetized rhesus monkey, in a rubber-lined Plexiglas box, was sprayed with an aerosol dose of Vollum 1B, the same anthrax strain later sold to Iraq. The particles of the mist measured one micron, perfect for lodging in the lungs. A specially de- signed ventilation system kept the air pressure in the glass box slightly lower than the outside air. The negative pressure kept the anthrax germs inside to infect other test monkeys. Col. Arthur M. Friedlander, chief of the bacteriology di- vision at Detrick, conducted this and other monkey experi- ments that demonstrated that inhaled anthrax spores deep in the alveoli of the lungs could take up to fifty-eight days to develop into the lethal bacterial form. Hundreds of dead monkeys at Camp Detrick proved it. A 1956 British article stated that anthrax spores could remain dormant in test mon-

keys for as long as a hundred days after aerosol exposure. Colonel Friedlander hypothesized that large doses of an-

tibiotic administered for a month would vanquish the dis- ease, and Dr. Alibek’s experience at the Soviet facility at the Stepnogorsk, a couple of years earlier, bore that out, when a technician who had been accidentally infected re- covered with this treatment.

Three of the six groups of monkeys at Camp Detrick were treated for thirty days with penicillin, doxycycline, or ciprofloxacin. Monkeys treated with daily antibiotics sur- vived into the fourth week while most of those in control groups died. The antibiotics were not always effective; thus they were not a complete solution; and they had to be ad-

ministered within twenty-four hours of contracting anthrax, a disease with no early warning symptoms.

Both antibiotics and vaccines can be defeated using widely known genetic engineering techniques to create re- sistant anthrax strains, or select naturally occurring anthrax strains, and at Vector in the former Soviet Union such a strain had been tested and perfected. The U.S. was anxious to get its hands on it in order to come up with a vaccine that would be effective against it.

THE
government awarded Ashland Incorporated of Coving- ton, Kentucky, and Sabre Oxidation Technologies of Odessa, Texas, the contracts for fumigation of the Hart Sen- ate Office Building. Sabre, the main contractor, operated five thousand generators around the globe, similar to the ones it would use on the Hart Building and, later, the massive Brentwood Postal Facility. The Hart Building was the first large structure in the nation’s history to undergo decontam- ination from anthrax.

Throughout November and December, the teams had poured over detailed engineering drawings and used scientific models to simulate air currents inside the Hart Building. To remove anthrax from the building would entail bleach disin- fectant, dust removal, the removal and decontamination of any equipment, replacement of heating and air-conditioning filters, gas fumigation, and HEPA filtration. First the Hart Building was sealed and all possible escape routes plugged.

The entire building had been closed on October 17 and more than half the senators relocated to temporary quarters.

On December 1, 2001, technicians pumped Senator Das- chle’s sealed office full of chlorine dioxide gas. After traces of anthrax were discovered in 9 of 377 environmental sam- ples, a second fumigation was done. In the interim, com- puters and files from his suite were packed and driven to Richmond, Virginia, where they were sanitized with ethyl- ene oxide. Liquid and foam forms of chlorine dioxide and HEPA filters were employed in the offices of eleven other senators. Congressman Mike Pence was one of three mem- bers of the House whose offices had been contaminated.

Throughout most of January 2002, men in space suits pumped yellow-green chlorine dioxide gas into the 100,000- cubic-foot office building. The gas can kill anthrax spores when injected into a sealed environment with a humidity of 75 percent. That humidity level softens a spore’s shell and allows chlorine gas to penetrate. Maintaining a minimum temperature of 75 degrees Fahrenheit helps the gas interact with protein and DNA.

It took multiple rounds to cleanse the huge edifice be- cause ventilation blockages disrupted humidity levels needed to ensure the effectiveness of the gas. Whatever they learned during the Hart cleanup would next be applied to the massive Brentwood fumigation, a far more daunting and complicated operation. Any suspected areas, ceilings, joists, and carpeting, were vacuumed free of dust using HEPA vac- uums. The collected dust was sealed in drums for disposal. The contaminated Senate building (the Hart Senate Office Building) and other Capitol Hill offices were cleansed of anthrax at a cost to the EPA of $42 million. Health author- ities were still studying how to sanitize the main mail-sorting facility in Washington. By January 22, staffers would be back at work inside the Hart Building once more.

Soon after returning to their offices, sixty employees in the Hart Building began complaining of dry eyes, dry throats, and pounding headaches. Another seventy-three Senate employees reported headaches, skin rashes, and dry mouth. Officials first considered flu and colds as the prob- able cause. After all, the symptoms were flulike, but then so were those of anthrax. Had trace amounts of anthrax spores somehow survived the rigorous decontamination or was it

something else? “We take these health complaints extremely seriously,” said the Office of Compliance. “These are the unknowns.” What was making the employees sick? Many Hart staffers complained of a chlorine smell. Were there leftover contaminants from the chlorine dioxide treatment? But skin reactions were also epidemic. Of the 750 mail han- dlers at the V Street NE station in D.C., 87 had become sick. Those unpacking cardboard boxes and plastic bags containing e-beam irradiated mail from Lima and Bridge- water facilities reported similar symptoms as those in the Hart Building—burning eyes, sneezing, nausea, breathing problems, and itching hands. The illnesses might be linked. By the end of January, the USPS was irradiating 350,000 items of federal mail a day and reassuring its mailroom workers that irradiated mail was safe. But complaints of fumes and illness continued. The adverse reactions might be from irradiated mail.

Finally, they hit upon a solution. The answer lay in the plastic bags used to hold the mail during the radiation pro- cess. Unhealthy levels of carbon monoxide and some vola- tile compounds were released when the plastic was exposed to radiation. The process also caused the mail to release ozone and carbon monoxide. In response, engineers deter- mined that a diminished dosage was enough to kill spores. They lowered radiation doses by nearly 40 percent and held the treated mail in a venting area for longer than a day. As for the skin irritations, the irradiation process made paper drier which meant employees handling the mail would en- counter more dust and thus have drier skin on their hands. At the beginning of the year metropolitan Washington got a $292 million congressional appropriation to upgrade emergency preparedness. The District’s share was $154 mil- lion earmarked for fourteen municipal departments. Four hundred million more in biodefense funds were due over the

next two years.

“After September Eleventh, if we did nothing else, we needed to communicate better,” said Margaret Kellems, dep- uty mayor for public safety and justice in charge of biode- fense for the District. The fire department bought a new hazardous materials unit equipped to handle biological,

chemical, and radiological events. The District had not had its own Hazmat capability since 1998. The city got new protective gear, traffic light upgrades, video camera tech- nology for managing traffic flow, pathogen-testing equip- ment, and a mobile lab.

The post office now offered citizens more advice in red, yellow, blue, and white: “Keep the Mail Safe. You can screen your mail before opening. Ask yourself: Is it from someone I don’t know? Does its return address appear le- gitimate? Is its weight unusual for its size? Is it lopsided or uneven? Does it have oil stains or a powdery deposit? Is it sealed with excessive amounts of tape? Is it marked with restrictive words like ‘Personal’ or ‘Confidential’?

“If You Receive Suspicious Mail: Don’t handle it if you suspect it’s contaminated. Don’t shake or sniff it. Don’t try to clean up powders or fluids. Isolate it by covering or plac- ing it in a sealed envelope or plastic bag. Keep others away from the area. Wash your hands for five to ten minutes with soap and water [advice some experts disagreed with]. Call 911 or your local law enforcement authorities and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.

“When Sending Mail: Double check the spelling of names and correct titles. Avoid using excessive amounts of tape [the anthrax letters were taped and the Unabomber’s packages were excessively taped] or sending odd-shaped packages. Alert the addressee prior to sending unexpected packages or out-of-the-ordinary packages.” Yet the Unabomber often wrote his victims in advance of his infernal devices: “You will be receiving a package.”

As for the postal workers, their union wrote them:

Certainly we want to be sure that every piece of mail we deliver is “clean,” free from anthrax spores or any other deadly biological agents that could harm the public. And we want a safe working environment for ourselves and our fellow postal employees. We want to be sure what happened at the Brentwood facility in Washington... never happens again. Anywhere... But a perfectly safe working environment and a safe mail system will not be achieved overnight. Evil or deranged killers are loose,

and they have demonstrated their willingness to attack innocent citizens through the dispersion of deadly germs. Keep on keeping on—and carrying on... You are out there on the street, delivering to every home and business in America despite the awful fears of anthrax.... Letter carriers are quiet heroes, helping America to regain its faith in the future.

At 11:30 a.m. on January 3, 2002, a delayed envelope bearing a London postmark was finally received and opened by a congressional staffer in Senator Daschle’s temporary quarters. It had been mailed in late November, but was caught up in the tons of Capitol mail undergoing irradiation cleansing. No one could fathom how a letter containing sus- picious white powder and a “threatening note” had managed to slip by unopened.

Hazmat-specialized Capitol police in protective gear ar- rived within ten minutes. Senator Daschle, who had been at work in another suite, was quickly relocated to a more dis- tant room. He remained there until police had conducted two field tests. The U.S. Navy biological defense program first created the field tests in 1996. They had been available com- mercially for about two years. Rapid field tests cost as much as one hundred dollars and work along the lines of a home pregnancy test. A surface is swabbed and placed in a liquid. That liquid is then squirted onto a paper strip laced with antibodies that will react with organisms. The appearance of a line denotes a positive test while the absence of a line is considered negative. The devices have a low threshold of sensitivity.

Designed to detect the spore-forming bacterium
Bacillus anthracis
, it also detects other forms of
bacillus
-type organ- isms. The presence of other chemicals can also compromise the test. Suspect powders are sent to a CDC-approved lab- oratory. The test can grow anthrax spores in a specially pre- pared soy-based medium within six hours with a final determination available in twenty-four hours.

Anthrax spores are still detectable even when rendered inert by radiation. The tests ruled out anthrax, active or ir- radiated, as ever being in the London letter. “Everything

about this points to a hoax,” said authorities. “Whoever mailed the letter apparently attempted to mimic the hand- writing on the envelope of a previous [anthrax] letter to Senator Daschle.”