Shouldn't we be able to find the spot where this stuff was (supposedly) dumped and test the soil there? Maybe she can pin down the location a little bit.
(steely)
exactly my thoughts, I thought the problem with anthrax is that it doesn't degrade - perhaps there is a chemical forumulation that can deactivate it
I often wondered how much of this stuff was dumped in the Persian Gulf or at the bottom of the Tigres/Euprhates river....or buried all over the desert
after all they just found barrels of Nazi mustard gas in the North Sea last year......
There are three basic methods - somebody googled them up - heat, chemicals, and radiation. The difficulty is the the spore of Bacillus anthracis is remarkably tough, and the heat required to guarantee 100% destruction is blowtorch-level. You can get lower yields with lower heat but you wouldn't want to release that into the environment, which is one reason that method is so expensive.
They may well have made advances in chemical methods since I took my last path course, but at the time concentrated formalin was the method of choice (same for the Mycobacteria such as the tuberculosis and leprosy bacilli for a similar reason - they do not sporulate but have an amazingly impenetrable lipid coat). Nasty stuff, and also has its own difficulties being released into the environment.
As for radiation, it takes a lot and the yield isn't great. There are no ongoing chemical reactions inside the spores to affect, so the idea is sufficient point mutations within the organism's nucleic acids will keep it from properly replicating.
The issue on the UN's mind (and ours, and the ex-Soviet scientists with similar challenges) is that whatever method was used was either better than our own or it didn't work. I'm betting on the latter. It would have taken a major plant somewhere to use any of the three methods described above - we're talking about 10,000 liters of the stuff, after all. It would have been something he could have shown the inspectors, and in fact he was required to do precisely that.
In which case the dump site is a very dangerous area right now.