SMALLPOX SMALLPOX A Deadly Recipe

LA Times ^ | July 28 2002 | WENDY ORENT

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ATLANTA -- Those American scientists who know Gen. Pyotr Burgasov don't expect much candor from him. Alexis Shelokov, a member of a U.S. scientific team that, in 1992, investigated a mysterious 1979 outbreak of anthrax in the then-Soviet Union city of Sverdlovsk, says the tall, silver-haired former deputy minister of health was "easy, pleasant, smiling, good to eat and drink with, a man who loved people and loved life. He was very comfortable with lying." Burgasov denied--and still denies--that the 68 people who died of inhalational anthrax in that outbreak were victims of a bioweapons accident. He insists they ate infected meat. But in a November 2001 interview in the Moscow News, the affable Burgasov offered candid advice to terrorists. Anthrax isn't worth much, he noted--it doesn't spread. "But smallpox--that's a real biological weapon," he said.

.....The report was sent to biodefense expert Alan P. Zelicoff of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, who also interviewed two of the original patients in Kazakhstan by telephone and subjected the data to rigorous statistical analysis. Zelicoff, a medical doctor, presented his findings June 15 at a National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine forum on smallpox vaccination, and Burgasov's bomb exploded.

The "exclusive recipe" of smallpox tested on Vozrazhdenie Island produced no ordinary disease. The young technician who first fell ill had been vaccinated. So had her brother, whom she infected when she returned to Aralsk. Both suffered, as Zelicoff determined, severe illness. And both were contagious. Although they survived, a young woman who visited them did not. She died of hemorrhagic smallpox, the most terrible form of the disease, which causes uncontrollable bleeding and rapid death. Two infants also died of hemorrhagic smallpox. None of the three had been vaccinated. The vaccinated patients did not die, but they came down with moderately severe disease.

Before naturally occurring smallpox disappeared in 1978, hemorrhagic smallpox was exceedingly rare--not more than 2.5% of all smallpox cases took this form, which was most common in countries such as India and Bangladesh, where crowded conditions allowed severe disease to spread more easily. Yet in Kazakhstan, all three nonvaccinated cases were hemorrhagic. The numbers are small but the percentage is unnerving.

Zelicoff's presentation provoked an instant uproar.......

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But smallpox--that's a real biological weapon," he said.

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Zelicoff's analysis goes further: He suggests that the particular
so-called Aralsk strain must have been epidemiologically selected to be
as hot as possible, "the strongest recipe of smallpox," in Burgasov's
inimitable phrasing. A commentary on Zelicoff's analysis, written by
smallpox expert Dr. Peter B. Jahrling of the U.S. Medical Research
Institute of Infectious Diseases, puts it this way: "We know that the
Soviet bioweapons development program attempted to select natural
strains of increased virulence and that one of the selection criteria
was hemorrhagic diathesis in mice and embryonated eggs." In other words,
Soviet bioweaponeers deliberately tested strains of smallpox to select
those most likely to "go hemorrhagic."