Posted on 09/27/2002 3:05:07 PM PDT by Heartlander2
Forget anthrax: It's smallpox that scares Alan Zelicoff.
It takes a lot to give Zelicoff the shivers: He's a senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, a medical doctor and physicist who works in the lab's center for national security and arms control.
His specialty is nonproliferation work against biological weapons of mass destruction.
What he's heard in the past five months about smallpox testing that occurred 30 years ago in the former Soviet Union, he says, "changes the entire face of the bioterrorism threat."
Speaking to a gathering of emergency personnel and terrorism specialists in Albuquerque on Thursday, Zelicoff said he believes the Soviets engineered strains of smallpox that are airborne, resistant to vaccines and spread very rapidly.
"Those strains weren't destroyed," he said. "We don't have any idea where they are. The prime researcher working on them retired and spent the rest of his life in a country other than Russia.
"I'll leave it to your fertile imagination to figure out where that is."
Zelicoff wouldn't say to which country the scientist moved.
Until little more than 50 years ago, smallpox was a worldwide scourge, with episodic breakouts killing people by the millions. Nearly a third of those infected died from the illness, which spreads through the air.
A vaccination program has made the disease so rare that most doctors are not even trained to recognize it.
Zelicoff said the Soviets developed and tested biological weapons on an island in the Aral Sea from the 1960s through the 1980s, even though it had signed a treaty banning biological weapons development.
"We learned only recently from an ex-Soviet that smallpox was actually their biological weapon of choice," he said.
A minor outbreak of smallpox of a type apparently engineered as a biological weapon was recorded in 1971, he said. In all, 10 people were infected, three of whom died. The other seven became ill but survived - and those seven had received vaccine as children.
"When you talk about vaccines and the ability to transmit smallpox, there's about a 2 percent chance that you'll still get the disease," Zelicoff said. "In this case, there was a 12 percent chance. That means the organism is easily spread and is resistant to vaccines. Vaccines are our only way to fight this disease."
Stopping the use of biological weapons has been a preoccupation of international bodies for decades. Having been a member of the advisory group that worked on the Biological Weapons Convention, Zelicoff is painfully aware of the shortcomings inherent in that approach to weapons control.
"Some people think the political approach is important. I think it's an abject failure," he said. Countries can have many legitimate reasons for having stockpiles of toxic agents, like botulism toxin, which has many medical uses but can also be a formidable weapon.
"So it's a treaty that bans evil intent; it doesn't ban ownership," Zelicoff said. "Verification of that is near impossible. How can you verify intent?"
The ability to act quickly when attacked is another approach, but it also has serious shortcomings, he said.
"We're facing a horrible problem," he said. "Detecting proliferation of a disease is very hard with sensors. Treaties are inadequate. Disease monitoring may be the only key to making the terrorist's job harder."
To that end, the most important approach may be a tool created by Sandia, he said. The Rapid Syndrome Validation Project, which has been running in New Mexico for the past year as part of a Sandia test of the technology, could help doctors find an outbreak quickly.
The project is an online software system that lets doctors confidentially enter information about symptoms seen in patients. The software compiles the information and overlays it on a map of the state.
With it, doctors, the military or the Centers for Disease Control can compare common symptoms in an area and see whether it looks like terrorists have deployed a biological weapon, such as smallpox, in a specific area.
"If we can detect smallpox or anthrax when the first few people get sick, we can save 90 percent of them," Zelicoff said.
Ultimately, doctors, government officials and the public need to pay close attention and report any suspicious symptoms or outbreaks quickly to prevent larger outbreaks, especially since information about Soviet work on the disease has come to light, Zelicoff said.
"I really thought I had my arms around Smallpox because I thought I understood the most vile applications of the disease," he said. "I was wrong."
SMALLPOX
A Deadly Recipe
By WENDY ORENT
Wendy Orent writes frequently on infectious disease and is currently writing a book about plague. July 28 2002
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.
Burgasov then dropped a bomb of his own, one that is still reverberating in the American corridors of power. "On Vozrazhdenie Island in the Aral Sea, the strongest recipes of smallpox were tested," he said. "Four hundred grams of smallpox formulation was exploded on the island." At that same time in 1971, he continued, a research vessel sailing on the Aral Sea passed within 15 kilometers of the testing site. A young technician was on board taking samples of plankton. The airborne smallpox "got her," in Burgasov's words, and she fell ill after returning home to the town of Aralsk, where she passed the infection on to her brother and other people. "I called [Yuri] Andropov, who at that time was chief of KGB, and informed him of the exclusive recipe of smallpox obtained on Vozrazhdenie Island," Burgasov said.
Burgasov's bomb took a long time to detonate. Dr. Ken Alibek, former deputy director of Biopreparat, the Soviet biological-weapons apparatus, reported on Burgasov's interview before the U.S. House Committee on International Relations in December, but no one paid attention. In April, however, the Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies received the original Soviet-era reports on the outbreak from Dr. Bakyt B. Atshabar, director of the Kazakh Scientific Center of Almaty, Kazakhstan. 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.
Dr. Donald A. Henderson, who directed the smallpox-eradication campaign and who has long advocated destruction of the remaining legitimate stores of the smallpox virus, immediately protested that, since smallpox still occurred in nearby Afghanistan, the technician may have caught the disease naturally at one of the several Central Asian ports the ship visited. But the woman, though she made many stops in the region, never visited Afghanistan, and no one who did fell ill. Furthermore, Burgasov himself states that this was a bioweapons incident. And former Soviet bioweapons scientist Sergei Popov, who now works for Advanced Biosystems Inc., a biodefense firm in Manassas, Va., says he had heard rumors of the Aralsk bioweapons outbreak for years. Evidence suggests that we should take Burgasov at his word.
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."
What does all this mean? Thirty years ago, Soviet scientists had weaponized a smallpox strain probably far more lethal than most forms of natural smallpox. We often hear that smallpox has a death rate of 30%, nothing like the 99% fatality rate of, say, untreated pneumonic plague. But in fact this is only an average. Smallpox strains from Africa killed about 10% of those infected, while the much hotter strains of India and Bangladesh killed many more, close to 50%.
Alibek, the former Soviet biological weapons official, has stated that the Soviets deliberately selected an especially lethal strain from India, the so-called India 1, as the basis for their smallpox bioweapon. Was the "exclusive recipe" from Aralsk the same as India 1? Possibly--but if not, then India 1 might be worse. And we do not know which strains may be in the hands of rogue nations.
A number of American scientists, including Zelicoff, have asked the Russian scientists at the Vector Laboratories of Novosibirsk, keepers of the Russian-held World Health Organization smallpox repository, to locate and turn over the Aralsk strain for joint collaborative study. Vector scientists deny knowledge of the strain or even the incident. This strikes some observers as implausible, though Vector did not exist in 1971, and its director and chief smallpox expert, Lev Sandakhchiev, was working on acetabularia, a form of giant algae, at the time. If Vector has the strain, however, it's unlikely the lab would be able to hand it over on its own. "Such a decision would have to be made at the highest levels of the Russian government," Alibek says. Meanwhile, a formal request for India 1 and other smallpox strains from the Vector repository has yet to be made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Without that formal request, says a knowledgeable official, the Russian scientists cannot issue an export license.
It isn't likely, therefore, that we'll soon understand the precise properties of the Aralsk strain, or India 1 for that matter. But we should be better prepared to face the smallpox threat than we are. The government should permit the American people to choose to be vaccinated now. A freshly vaccinated population--excluding the very young, those with major skin disorders and people with seriously compromised immune systems--could well deter a smallpox strike in the first place. Why waste effort trying to infect a vaccinated population?
Even if an attack occurred, widespread vaccination would minimize death and social disruption. Furthermore, the ongoing research by Jahrling and his team into less dangerous vaccines and better antiviral drugs to treat smallpox after infection should become a top priority of the CDC and the federal government.
Now we know, thanks to Zelicoff's efforts and Burgasov's candor, what weaponized smallpox strains can do. But if the event at Aralsk was the devil's fingertip, what would the whole hand be like?
We should take steps to ensure we never find out.
Ask the democrats ....they have decided that the presidents only intent is to drive them from the Senate
How many doses are available, right now. If there isn't enough to vacinate the vast majority of the population, voluntary vacination is not politically or socially feasible.
The US government keeps a list of nations and groups that it suspects either have clandestine stocks of smallpox or seem to be trying to buy or steal the virus. The list is classified, but it is said to include Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Serbia, terrorist organization of Osama bin Laden and, possibly, the Aum Shinrikyo sect of Japan.
Ken Alibek, who was once Kanatjan Alibekov, a leading Soviet bioweaponeer and the inventor of the world's most powerful anthrax, defected, in 1992, and revealed how far the Soviet Union had gone with bioweapons. Alibek says that there were twenty tons of liquid smallpox kept on hand at Soviet military bases.
In 1989, a Soviet biologist named Vladimir Pasechnik defected to Britain. British intelligence spent a year debriefing him. By the end, the British agents felt they had confirmed that the U.S.S.R. had biological missiles aimed at the US. This information reached President George Bush and the British PM Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher then apparently confronted the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. She was furious, and so was Bush. Gorbachev responded by allowing a small, secret team of American and British bioweapons inspectors to tour Soviet biowarfare facilities. In January of 1991, the inspectors travelled across the U.S.S.R., getting whirlwind looks at some of the major clandestine bases of the Soviet biowarfare program, which was called Biopreparat. The inspectors were frightened by what they discovered. ("I would describe it as scary, and I feel a responsibility to tell the world medical community about what I saw, because doctors could face these diseases," said one inspector, Frank Malinoski, M.D., Ph.D.) On January 14th, the team arrived at Vector, the main virology complex, in Siberia, and the next day, they were shown into a laboratory called Building 6, where one of the inspectors, David Kelly, took a technician aside and asked him what virus they had been working with. The technician said that they had been working with smallpox. Kelly repeated the question three times. Three times, he asked the technician, "You mean you were working with Variola major?" and he emphasized to the technician that his answer was very important. The technician responded emphatically that it was Variola major [the killer strain]. Kelly says that his interpreter was the best Russian interpreter the British government has. "There was no ambiguity," Kelly says. The inspectors were stunned. Vector was not supposed to have any smallpox at all, much less be working with it -- a supreme violation of rules set down by the W.H.O.
Per Malinoski: "There were tons of smallpox virus made in the Soviet Union. The Russians admitted that to us. One of the Vector leaders when he said to us, 'Listen, we didn't account for every ampule of the virus. We had large quantities of it on hand. There were plenty of opportunities for staff members to walk away with an ampule. Although we think we know where our formerly employed scientists are, we can't account for all of them-we don't know where all of them are.' " Today, smallpox and its protocols could be anywhere in the world.
Sitting with D. A. Henderson [widely credited with the eradication of smallpox] in his house, I mentioned what seemed to be the great and tragic paradox of his life's work. The eradication caused the human species to lose its immunity to smallpox, and that was what made it possible for the Soviets to turn smallpox into a weapon rivalling the hydrogen bomb.
Henderson responded with silence, and then said thoughtfully, "I feel very sad about this. The eradication never would have succeeded without the Russians. Viktor Zhdanov [who first raised the idea] started it, and they did so much. They were extremely proud of what they had done. I felt the virus was in good hands with the Russians. I never would have suspected. They made twenty tons -- twenty tons -- of smallpox. For us to have come so far with the disease, and now to have to deal with this human creation, when there are so many other problems in the world . . ." He was quiet again. "It's a great letdown," he said.
Immune people are like control rods in a nuclear reactor. The American population has little immunity [the vaccination begins to wear off after 10 years], so it's a reactor with no control rods. We could have an uncontrolled smallpox chain reaction." This would be something that terrorism experts refer to as a "soft kill" of the United States of America.
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There is no small pox virus in the vaccine!
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