#117 25 Oct 2001

USAF COUNTERPROLIFERATION CENTER CPC OUTREACH JOURNAL Air University Air War College Maxwell AFB, Alabama Welcome to the CPC Outreach Journal. As part of USAF Counterproliferation Center’s mission to counter weapons of mass destruction through education and research, we’re providing our government and civilian community a source for timely counterproliferation information. This information includes articles, papers and other documents addressing issues pertinent to US military response options for dealing with nuclear, biological and chemical threats and attacks. It’s our hope this information resource will help enhance your counterproliferation issue awareness.

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CONTENTS

Fact Sheet: State Department on Chemical-Biological Agents Companies Probe Use of Steam on Germs TENTH CIVIL SUPPORT TEAM CERTIFIED America At War: Bioterrorism: Anthrax Bioterrorism Preparations Lacking at Lowest Levels Panel to suggest national facility to make vaccines Vaccine may aid treatment, but none approved for public World Goes on Anthrax Alert Russia's killer anthrax under lock and key Companies focus on smallpox vaccine Key U.S. Senator Against Unilateral Withdrawal From ABM Treaty Disarming Biological Weapons Anthrax Stirs U.S. Review Of Foreign Germs Programs Sept. 11 Attacks Led To Push For More Smallpox Vaccine Preparing America For The Reality Of Germ Warfare Anthrax Threat Takes A Wider Scope; New Cases Emerge; Some Mail Halted Anthrax, Weapons Compared Granules Sprayed On Coast Guard Post Lawlor To Be Pentagon Rep In New U.S. Homeland Security Office Atomic Bomb Test Site Could Get War Role Source Of Tainted Mail Remains Mystery CDC: Germ Hunters' Atlanta Home Base Is Leader In Global Anthrax Fight On Many Fronts, Experts Plan For The Unthinkable: Biowarfare World's Largest Germ-Bank Union Acts to Keep Terrorists From Stealing Deadly Stocks Military Set To Begin Major Bio-Cleanup Of Boca Raton Tabloid Offices

18 October 2001 Fact Sheet: State Department on Chemical-Biological Agents (Americans urged to stay informed, be prepared) (880)

The State Department issued the following fact sheet on Chemical-Biological Agents October 18.

U.S. Department of State Washington, D.C.

FACT SHEET CHEMICAL -- BIOLOGICAL AGENTS

The recent terrorist threats and confirmed cases of exposure to anthrax have caused an increase in anxiety over the possibility of chemical and biological attacks (CBA). Currently, the method of delivery of anthrax has been by letter or package. While the risk of such attacks is limited, it cannot be excluded. As always, the Department will promptly share with American citizens overseas any credible information about threats to their safety. Americans should stay informed and be prepared for any eventuality.

In 1999, the Department of Defense announced its intention to commence the Family and Force Protection Initiative (FFPI) in order to provide enhanced protection to the dependents of U.S. military service members and to civilian Department of Defense (DOD) employees and their families. This program was first implemented for U.S. Forces Korea.

The Department of State has had a chemical and biological countermeasure program since 1998, when it began to deploy chemical antidotes and antibiotics to selected posts abroad. While we have no information to indicate there is an imminent threat from use of anthrax or other biological agents as a weapon against our overseas missions at this time, the Department is expanding its countermeasure program. As a precaution, the Department requested our missions overseas to stock a three-day supply of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin for all individuals who work in or frequent the missions.

This small supply of ciprofloxacin is being pre-positioned to ensure rapid access to this protective antibiotic for our employees in case of an Anthrax exposure in an overseas U.S. Government (USG) facility and would allow the mission sufficient time to provide access to care for all individuals exposed while securing additional supplies of antibiotics. Once an exposure is suspected, all individuals who had been exposed in our workplace would be provided antibiotics pending a full investigation of the exposure. This would include any private American citizen present in the facility at the time of exposure.

Again, if the Department becomes aware of any specific and credible threat to the safety and security of American citizens abroad, that information will be provided to them promptly.

Exposures to CBA that occur outside USG facilities would require the involvement of local public health authorities who would provide information and if necessary, protective antibiotics to the general public. Ciprofloxacin and other antibiotics effective against Anthrax, including doxycycline and amoxicillin are available with a prescription in most pharmacies throughout the world.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the lead government agency on infectious diseases, including chemical/biological agents (CBA). For detailed information on CBA, including Anthrax, inquirers are referred to the CDC Internet home page at http://www.cdc.gov. The CDC's international travelers hotline telephone number is 1-877-FYI-TRIP (1-877-394-8747); fax: 1-888-CDC-FAXX (1-888-232-3299).

As always, American citizens should review their own personal security situations and take those precautions they deem appropriate to ensure their well-being.

Some general information on chemical-biological agents (CBA) follows:

-- Biological agents can be dispersed by an aerosol spray that must be inhaled. However, these agents can also be used to contaminate food, water and other products. Attention to basic food hygiene when traveling abroad is very important.

-- Some chemical agents may be volatile -- evaporating rapidly to form clouds of agent. Others may be persistent. These agents may act directly on the skin, lungs, eyes, respiratory tract or be absorbed through your skin and lungs causing injury. Choking and nerve agents damage the soft tissue in these organs.

-- When properly used, appropriate masks are effective protection to prevent the inhalation of either biological or chemical agents; however this assumes an adequate warning. Gas masks alone do not protect against agents that act through skin absorption. Those who wish to acquire protective equipment for personal use should contact commercial vendors.

-- There is an incubation period after exposure to biological agents. It is essential that you seek appropriate care for illnesses acquired while traveling abroad to assure prompt diagnosis and treatment.

-- One of the biological warfare agents is the spore-forming bacterium that causes Anthrax, an acute infectious disease. It should be noted, however, that effective dispersal of the Anthrax bacteria is difficult.

-- Anthrax is treatable if that treatment is initiated promptly after exposure. The post-exposure treatment consists of certain antibiotics administered in combination with the vaccine.

-- An anthrax vaccine that confers protective immunity does exist, but is not readily available to private parties. Efficacy and safety of use of this vaccine for persons under 18 or over 65 and pregnant women have not been determined.

-- The anthrax vaccine is produced exclusively by Bioport under contract to the Department of Defense. Virtually all vaccine produced in the United States is under Defense Department contract primarily for military use and a small number of other official government uses.

-- For additional information, please consult your health care provider or local health authority. http://usinfo.state.gov/cgi- bin/washfile/display.pl?p=/products/washfile/topic/intrel&f=01101801.ppo&t=/products/washfile/newsitem.shtml

Companies Probe Use of Steam on Germs By Justin Pope AP Business Writer Friday, Oct. 19, 2001; 3:59 a.m. EDT BOSTON –– Steam, chemicals and even radiation have been used for decades to fight the dangerous germs that settle on everything from chicken parts to surgical instruments. Now, anthrax attacks have the "industrial sterilization" industry scrambling to see if its technology might work on something new: unopened mail. Several companies say they're fielding calls asking whether their machines could be used in mail rooms to zap or steam away dangerous bacteria, such as anthrax. At least one says it's lining up deals to run mail through an irradiator. Some insist the technology could be an effective way to make mail safer. But others see huge practical challenges. "Anthrax is easy to kill," said Arthur Trapotsis, a scientist at Consolidated Machine Corp., a small Boston company that has been turning out steam sterilizers – essentially giant pressure cookers – for 50 years. "It's not difficult to kill a spore on paper. It's when it's in your system that it's difficult." For all the fear they've provoked, anthrax bacteria are vulnerable to the same weapons outside the body as other kinds of germs – namely wet heat and gamma rays. One expert has even said ironing a letter would kill anthrax spores inside, though others say it could take 20 minutes of solid, intense heat. Last week, Trapotsis tried smearing bacteria on a stack of letters and putting them into one of the company's oven- sized units. He shut the door, infused 250-degree steam for a few minutes, and filtered out the air. The letters emerged undamaged and, according to tests, bacteria-free. The company makes walk-in sized units that could handle more mail. But Consolidated Machine founder Bill Barnstead says he's had no customers for those steamers so far. He's sent letters to government officials but hasn't heard back. Meanwhile, irradiation companies such as Steris Corp., based in Mentor, Ohio., and MDS Nordion, based in Ontario, say they're moving cautiously in response to calls about their irradiation devices, some of which can disinfect with a barrage of gamma rays. MDS Nordion spokeswoman Paula Burchat says the first commercial irradiator was used in the 1960s to kill any lingering anthrax germs in lambs wool sweaters. In Mulberry, Fla., Food Technology Service has already lined up several companies to use excess capacity at the company's irradiation facility, normally used for "truckloads" of animal parts and fruit. The company's stock more than doubled to more than $3 in the last week before falling back below that mark Thursday. Chief Executive Richard Hunter says deals are in the final stages to irradiate mail for several companies, at a cost of a few cents per letter. "It doesn't change the mail, leave any stain or residue, it's not radioactive," Hunter says. "But it does kill any pathogens, it sterilizes." Numerous clients have asked the Securities Services Group at Kroll Inc., the world's largest risk consulting firm, whether such technology could protect their mail rooms, according to chief operating officer Jeff Schlanger. "I believe it has great potential," he said. "We're looking into the irradiation of bulk quantities of mail." Biochemist Allen Louie, of Cambridge-based consulting firm Arthur D. Little, says irradiating mail raises numerous problems. Radiation, though safe to people, could damage contents, as could steam. Gamma rays could also be deflected by a metal box inside a package, and they work better in wet environments. Furthermore, "something that's in the middle of a bundle would not get as good treatment as something toward the end of a bundle," he said. But the real problems are logistical and financial. Spokesmen at several companies acknowledge the current machines, though some as large as a small room, simply aren't designed for huge quantities of mail. "Even the big (sterilizers) couldn't do even a fraction of the amount of mail that would come through a company's mail room," Louie said. The logical place to irradiate would be at centralized Post Office locations, Louie said, but that could cause delivery delays. It would be easier to irradiate only suspicious mail or mail at obvious targets, like the U.S. Capitol. "They look like promising technologies. They're not going to be there tomorrow," said Postal Service spokesman Greg Frey. "In the meantime, we need to get through this." At Consolidated Machine, the Boston company, founder Bill Barnstead said he wouldn't be out to profit from steaming mail; a home-sized unit would cost $300-$500. Its biggest units, walk-in size, cost $100,000. For MDS Nordion's 4,000-6,000 square foot units, construction and installation costs are between $3 million and $5 million. Numbers like that would worry the Post Office, which delivers 680 million pieces of mail per day and says it was already in financial straits before the Sept. 11 attacks. "We welcome the technology," Frey said. "We also welcome anyone's idea on how to pay for the technology." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20011019/aponline035956_000.htm

IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 18, 2001 TENTH CIVIL SUPPORT TEAM CERTIFIED The Department of Defense notified Congress yesterday that the Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team (WMD-CST) from the Georgia National Guard is now certified. This team is fully ready to assist civil authorities respond to a domestic weapon of mass destruction incident and possesses the requisite skills, training and equipment to be proficient in all mission requirements. The team, the 4th WMD-CST, is stationed at Dobbins Air Reserve Base, Ga. Congress has authorized 32 WMD-CSTs. The Georgia National Guard team certified today is the last of the first 10 teams authorized in the National Defense Appropriations Act for fiscal 1999. An additional 17 teams were authorized in fiscal 2000; five more teams were authorized in fiscal 2001. The department has certified the 1st WMD-CST, Natick, Mass.; the 2nd WMD-CST, Scotia, N.Y.; the 3rd WMD- CST, Annville, Pa.; the 5th WMD-CST, Bartonville, Ill.; the 6th WMD-CST, Austin, Texas; the 7th WMD-CST, Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.; the 8th WMD-CST, Aurora, Colo.; the 9th WMD-CST Los Alamitos, Calif.; and the 10th WMD-CST, Tacoma, Wash.

(Editor’s Note: Article below is very long, access hyperlink after article for balance of report.) America At War: Bioterrorism: Anthrax With Jonathan B. Tucker, Ph.D. Monterey Institute of International Studies Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2001; 2 p.m. EDT Jonathan B. Tucker, Ph.D., an expert on chemical and biological weapons in the Washington, D.C. office of the Monterey Institute of International Studies and the author of "Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox," was online Wednesday, Oct. 17 at 2 p.m. EDT to talk about bioterrorism and anthrax. "Congressional leaders announced today that the Capitol and office buildings for the House of Representatives will be closed from Thursday through Monday following the discovery that more than 20 members of Sen. Thomas A. Daschle's (D-S.D.) office staff were exposed to anthrax when a contaminated letter was opened there Monday." Read the article House to Shut Doors After Apparent Anthrax Outbreak (Post, Oct. 17, 2001) Tucker directs the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, a private graduate school in Monterey, California. Before joining CNS, Tucker worked as an arms control fellow at the Department of State, an analyst in the international security program at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, and a foreign affairs specialist in the office of chemical/biological policy at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He also served as senior policy analyst on the staff of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses. In February 1995, he was a biological weapons inspector in Iraq under the auspices of the United Nations Special Commission. A transcript follows. Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.

Chattanooga, Tenn.: Is is possible that the smallpox virus could be effectively distributed by contaminating mail as we have seen with the recent anthrax incidents? If so, is there any way to detect or defend against that kind of attack? Dr. Jonathan Tucker: Unlike anthrax, smallpox cannot infect people through cuts or abrasions in the skin, but only by being inhaled. Thus, the virus would have to be disseminated through the air to cause infection. It is known that before smallpox was eradicated, laundry-workers who handled the sheets and blankets of smallpox patients could aerosolize the virus and become infected. Perhaps if the smallpox virus was sent through the mail as a dried powder, it might be infectious, but it would be extremely difficult to produce the virus in this form.

Washington, D.C.: Is there any speculation on why there is a return address of "4th grade" on the envelope sent to Sen. Daschle? Dr. Jonathan Tucker: One can only speculate as to the motive, but perhaps the sender sought to mislead the recipient into thinking that the letter was harmless.

Tampa, Fla.: Is it possible to be infected with small pox, then receive the vaccine and be cured? Dr. Jonathan Tucker: The smallpox vaccine (vaccinia virus) is unique among vaccines in that it works extremely rapidly. Protective immunity results in about 10 days after vaccination. The vaccine can also prevent smallpox, or at least reduce its severity, if administered within four days of infection with the virus. (Smallpox has an incubation period of roughly 12-14 days before symptoms appear.) Once the skin rash has developed, however, no treatment is available…. http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/01/attack_tucker1017.htm

Bioterrorism Preparations Lacking at Lowest Levels Despite Warnings and Funds, Local Defenses Come Up Short By Joby Warrick and Steve Fainaru Washington Post Staff Writers Monday, October 22, 2001; Page A07 The chaos, long lines and misinformation that roiled Washington in the wake of last week's anthrax attack has underscored a long-standing weakness in the nation's defense against terrorism: In preparing for bioterrorism, the federal government has not always clued in the emergency workers, hospitals and physicians who must manage the front lines in any assault. "Confusion reigns at the lowest levels," said Mohammad Akhter, executive director of the American Public Health Association, who watched with growing unease last week as a single anthrax-tainted letter pushed the Washington area's emergency response system to the limit. He added, "This is the one thing that causes us to shake in our boots." The federal government has staged more than 200 training exercises in the late 1990s, some of which were designed to help local emergency officials prepare for future attacks by terrorists wielding everything from anthrax aerosols to crude nuclear devices. The exercises were part of an increased effort to prepare the nation for terrorist threats, an effort in which spending tripled to nearly $10 billion a year since 1996. As recently as last year, however, special federal panels and government audits warned of critical gaps at state and local levels. Half of all U.S. states lacked even a single "disease detective" to investigate outbreaks, public health officials said. Ten percent of the nation's 120 largest city and county health departments did not have e-mail. "The Executive Branch and the Congress have not paid sufficient attention to state and local capabilities for combating terrorism," concluded a December 2000 report by a White House advisory panel on terrorism chaired by Virginia Gov. James S. Gilmore III (R). A "disproportionately small" amount of the federal government's nearly $11 billion counterterrorism budget trickles down to the state and local readiness efforts, the panel said. Since the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Bush administration has asked for an additional $1.5 billion to prepare the nation for a broad array of biological threats, including anthrax and the plague. Only a fraction of the money is aimed at preparing communities for future threats. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson on Friday called the additional spending a "first step" and predicted that more money would be found for communities. But public health officials say the experiences of the past two weeks have underscored an urgent need to strengthen local public health infrastructures, from hospital emergency rooms to local laboratories. "My impression is that everyone is stretched to the limit," said Margaret Hamburg, a former New York City health commissioner and former assistant secretary of Health and Human Services. "It certainly does tell us that we have to make sure that we have greater depth on the bench for the future." The Gilmore report and another high-profile advisory panel, the National Commission on Terrorism, both issued reports last year warning of other major gaps in the nation's bioterrorism defense, including inadequate research into technologies to detect, treat and decontaminate biological hazards in a terrorist attack. They also criticized "insufficient" federal government controls on existing stocks of terrorism-friendly pathogens such as anthrax and smallpox, as well as the specialized equipment needed to transform them into weapons. Scores of universities and private laboratories maintain supplies of anthrax spores for research purposes and federal officials acknowledge they have no central database for tracking the stocks. Federal investigators believe anthrax cultures sold to an Iraqi university in 1988 by a Manassas, Va., lab were co-opted into Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program. "None of the recommendations were enacted into law" until the Sept. 11 hijackings pushed domestic terrorism to the top of Congress's agenda, said L. Paul Bremer III, co-chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism and the former State Department "ambassador-at-large" for counterterrorism. One reason for the inaction: Security experts were divided on whether the bioterrorism threat was real or merely theoretical. The General Accounting Office, drawing on interviews with top counterterrorism officials, concluded in a report last year that the risk of large-scale attack was small, owing to formidable technical obstacles involved in dispersing lethal pathogens over a large area. "Much of the federal effort to combat terrorism has been based on vulnerabilities rather than an analysis of credible threats," the GAO said in its April 2000 report. The anthrax scare that began with the death of a Florida photo editor two weeks ago is the first fatal instance of bioterrorism in the nation's history. After one death, seven confirmed illnesses and several dozen exposures, it remains unclear whether the deadly spores originated in this country or overseas, or if they were orchestrated by an international terrorist organization such as al Qaeda or a domestic copycat group. What is clear is that that attack on the U.S. Capitol building rattled a public health system unaccustomed to dealing with such threats. The first hours after the discovery of anthrax in the office of Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) were fraught with confusion as government agencies and hospitals moved on separate and sometimes conflicting tracks. Story lines changed by the hour: Were the anthrax spores of "weapons grade" or of a cruder variety amenable to treatment? Had anthrax entered the Capitol ventilation system or not? To learn whether they had been exposed, anxious staffers and visitors at first consulted with the Capitol Physician's office for screening tests. Later, amid ever-longer lines and growing anxiety, House and Senate offices dispatched workers to private hospitals and physicians -- only to be referred back to the Capitol in many cases. Employees were examined and tested by medical officials who in many cases had never seen anthrax, let alone treated it. At least one physician phoned the District Health Department asking for the names of labs that could test for anthrax. After more than 100 people showed up at George Washington University Hospital, hospital officials called District Health Director Ivan C.A. Walks for guidance. "What are we doing?" one top hospital manager wanted to know. Public health experts said Wednesday's chaos in Washington was emblematic of a national failure to coordinate a response to terror between federal, state and local governments. "The reality is that we are underprepared and we need to do lots of work in addition to buying more vaccines and antibiotics," said the American Public Health Association's Akhter, who represents 55,000 public health workers. "We need to spend time shoring up the basic monitoring system that connects the hospitals, the public health departments, the clinics and the individual physicians. That system is either nonexistent or very, very weak." America's vaunted public health institutions, such as the Centers for Disease Control, are much better at identifying outbreaks than helping communities cope with them, said John G. Bartlett, chief of the Infectious Diseases Division for the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. "If you had a big epidemic, you need the local health facilities," Bartlett said. "For a little anthrax thing where someone in the building receives some white powder in the mail, I think the public health system is fine. If there's a big one, you're going to need some friends, and the army of physicians and nurses in Washington is huge and to me they need to be in the information loop." Since the outbreaks, the Bush administration has worked to speed production of antibiotics to treat anthrax and other potential hazards. But to Bartlett, a more vexing problem is guiding local health officials in distributing drugs to people with different symptoms and different conditions. Again, the Capitol Hill situation was instructive. "It's a logistical problem: How do you give it out and how do you package it?" Bartlett said. "This person needs this much because they're under the age of 12. This person needs this much because they're pregnant. Once you dump it in New York, how do you give it out?" Despite the shortcomings, health officials said the nation is far better equipped to deal with biological terror than it was a decade ago. Beginning with a presidential directive by the Clinton administration in 1995, the federal government dramatically increased spending on counterterrorism, including preparations for a biological attack. The $1 billion in annual federal spending on defense against weapons of mass destruction has gone toward building up a national stockpile of antibiotics as well as high-tech kits for detecting the presence of dangerous pathogens and chemicals. In 1996, Congress approved the Defense Against Weapons of Mass Destruction Act, which provided funds for training and equipment. More than 200 counterterrorism training exercises were held by the federal government, some of which involved local emergency crews and focused on biological and chemical threats. One of the biggest was "Operation TOPOFF 2000," which simulated a bioterrorist attack on Denver. Tommy F. Grier Jr., director of Colorado's Office of Emergency Management, said the results of the bioterrorism exercise "got some folks quite concerned," showing how ill-prepared local emergency planners were for a real attack. "We learned that it's absolutely essential to have prepared medical practitioners when people with symptoms start showing up in the emergency rooms," Grier said. "Quick detection makes a hell of a lot of difference. [But] we also learned that the distribution of those meds, once you get them, is an issue that you have to think through." In a June 2001 exercise dubbed "Dark Winter," a dozen former senior government leaders portrayed members of a fictional National Security Council responding to an evolving smallpox epidemic in which as many as 2,000 people die. Former Georgia senator Sam Nunn, who played the role of president in the exercise, said the experience showed a need for new levels of partnerships between public health, law enforcement and intelligence. "We must act on the understanding that public health is an important pillar in our national security framework," Nunn said in testimony to Congress six days before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "In the event of a biological weapons attack, millions of lives will depend on how quickly doctors diagnose the illness, communicate their findings, and bring forth a fast and effective response at the local and federal level. This means, clearly, that public health and medical professionals must be part of the national security team." "It's a lucky thing for the United States that this was just a test and not a real emergency," Nunn said. He added: "Our lack of preparation is a real emergency." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31008-2001Oct21.html

Panel to suggest national facility to make vaccines The Wall Street Journal - US Abstracts; Oct 22, 2001

A federally appointed commission on terrorism is expected to recommend that the government establish a national facility to develop vaccines to protect against biological agents. The Gilmore Commission, chaired by the Governor of Virginia James Gilmore, is expected to issue its report to the president and Congress in December. Jennifer Brower, policy analyst at the Rand Commission, which is providing research to the Gilmore Commission, said the market for vaccines is too small and variable for the pharmaceutical industry to be interested in. "In order to get the supplies we need, we have to have a government owned facility," she said. Abstracted from: The Wall St Journal http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/article.html?id=011022003930

Vaccine may aid treatment, but none approved for public By Jeremy Manier Tribune staff reporter Published October 21, 2001

Before the recent anthrax cases emerged, a panel of top medical experts recommended that people exposed to the bacteria receive the anthrax vaccine along with potent antibiotics.

Two years later, in the midst of an anthrax alert, the group's recommendations cannot be fully implemented because there is no vaccine approved for the public. Moreover, the military's vaccine program has been plagued with production problems. Antibiotics remain the best available treatment for anthrax, and experts say a full course of such drugs almost certainly will kill the bacteria.

But some experts think adding vaccination might make the current therapy even more effective--if only the vaccine were available.

"If [the vaccine] were available, I would definitely encourage it to be used," said Dr. Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota anthrax expert who served on the 14-member panel for the Journal of the American Medical Association. "The recommendations in that paper are no different today than they were then."

The impasse is one of many headaches stemming from regulatory violations at the BioPort Corp. vaccine plant in Lansing, Mich. The plant, which is the country's sole source of anthrax vaccine, has not produced a single dose since 1998. As a result, the military has vaccinated only about 500,000 of the 2.4 million troops the Pentagon wanted to inoculate.

The anthrax vaccine never has been available to the public--though experts such as Dr. David Franz of the Southern Research Institute long have lobbied for a civilian stockpile. On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention applied to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for limited use of the vaccine as a fallback for civilians who were exposed to anthrax but were allergic to antibiotics.

Getting vaccinated after exposure to the disease might seem like shutting the barn door after the horses have run off. But infectious-disease experts said post-exposure vaccination is a common strategy that can spur the body's immune system to action even after infection.

In the case of anthrax, vaccination encourages antibodies against the bacteria to develop more quickly than they would naturally, experts said. The 1999 journal consensus statement, "Anthrax as a Biological Weapon," recommended using anthrax vaccine with antibiotics for optimum protection.

Such a combination would shorten the 60-day course of antibiotics for anthrax, experts said. The vaccine also would give protection in case some spores survived the onslaught of antibiotics, said Osterholm, director of the center for infectious disease research and policy at Minnesota.

"There is a remote yet a concerning risk that someone could actually have onset of symptoms after the 60-day course of Cipro," Osterholm said.

Franz, former commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, agreed that although antibiotics alone should be enough, there is evidence that post-exposure vaccination would help.

"If the vaccine is available, you try to get three doses of the vaccine into the patient," said Franz, who oversaw research at the institute in the early 1990s, when researchers there tested the effectiveness of post-exposure vaccination in monkeys.

CDC spokeswoman Kathy Harben said people exposed to anthrax are not receiving vaccine routinely because antibiotics alone are effective. The issue is a source of debate; some experts pointed out that the vaccine can have side effects.

The 1999 medical journal panel based its vaccine recommendation on studies showing that the risk of reinfection from dormant anthrax spores persists "for at least 60 days" after an initial exposure.

Taking antibiotics for 60 days should prevent such reinfection, experts say. But vaccination would grant more protection, the report said.

"If vaccine were to become widely available, post-exposure vaccination in patients being treated for anthrax infection might permit the duration of antibiotic administration to be shortened to 30 to 45 days," the authors wrote.

That would reduce the course of antibiotic treatment by up to one-half--a significant improvement given the possible side effects of drugs like Cipro, experts said.

Post-exposure vaccination for anthrax was endorsed in a separate 1999 report co-written by Col. Edward Eitzen, the current commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Writing in the CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, the authors recommended, "In addition to receiving chemoprophylaxis [antibiotics], exposed persons should be immunized."

The source of those recommendations is a series of anthrax experiments conducted on monkeys at the Army's Ft. Detrick, Md., laboratories after the Gulf War. Researchers found that giving antibiotics killed so many bacteria that infected monkeys did not develop a natural immune response to anthrax.

Researchers say there is a risk, albeit a remote one, that dormant anthrax spores could germinate and reinfect a person after antibiotic therapy.

The Ft. Detrick work was not conclusive, but it suggested that combining vaccination and antibiotics has merit. All nine monkeys given that combination survived exposure to inhalation anthrax, while one to three monkeys died in each group that received antibiotics alone for 30 days.

"Cipro does not kill the spore," Osterholm said. "The antibiotics attack the vegetative form of bacteria when it's lying in the blood. If some spores were still in the chest after antibiotics were stopped, there would be a risk. It's not likely that would happen, but it's possible."

Not all researchers agree. Martin Hugh-Jones, an epidemiologist and anthrax expert at Louisiana State University, said most of the recent exposures are too mild to justify vaccination.

Although Franz said vaccination would be useful now, he said he is confident that early and aggressive use of antibiotics will be enough.

"If you don't have any vaccine available, you keep people on antibiotics for 60 days," Franz said. "Scientifically, I think that's sound." http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0110210055oct21.story

World Goes on Anthrax Alert By Hans Greimel Associated Press Writer Monday, October 22, 2001; 12:44 PM TOKYO –– Fear of suspicious powder sent firefighters racing to two embassies in Malaysia, halted mail service in Finland and forced evacuation of a high school and a government building in Japan on Monday. Global jitters worsened after tests discovered traces of anthrax in white powder leaking from a letter at a Bahamas post office and doctors diagnosed a new case of the deadly disease in the United States. The Bahamas incident was the third case of anthrax in letters outside the United States. The two others were in Kenya and Argentina. Of the hundreds of suspicious packets surfacing worldwide, most have been ruled false alarms. Authorities have little choice but to check each scare. "Our country absolutely can't take this threat too lightly," Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian said Monday, deciding to step up emergency drills and stockpile vaccines. "We must be prepared for every possible threat." In Finland and Denmark, the countries' main mail sorting centers closed when white powder was found leaking from letters. The Copenhagen shutdown delayed delivery of 75,000 letters, while the Finnish workers were rushed to disinfecting showers. In Japan, 900 high school students were sent home after a powder-filled envelope was mailed to their school, and police in the northern city of Sapporo were investigating white powder scattered on the bathroom floor of a government office. Police suspect pranks in both cases. In Malaysia, workers at the U.S. embassy in Kuala Lumpur were given antibiotics as a precaution after the building received a letter with a powdery substance. India tried to soothe a nervous public Monday by issuing government guidelines on anthrax treatment to more than 50,000 health care centers across the country. Powder sent last week to the offices of The Associated Press in Indian-controlled Kashmir province tested negative for anthrax, hospital officials said Monday. Cable News Network and the Himalayan Mail newspaper said powders sent to their Kashmir offices also proved to be harmless. In France, the government said it had registered 1,000 false alerts last week, but the daily number appeared to be dwindling. After a peak of 360 such incidents on Thursday, there were only 31 on Sunday. In Sri Lanka, the French and U.S. embassies both reported suspicious letters on Monday, as did the Australian and Indian diplomatic offices, the U.N. Development Program and the state television network. In Bahrain, one floor of the National Bank of Bahrain was evacuated while officials carried away another letter. After three more alerts in Ukraine, national security chief Yevhen Marchuk said postal workers from now on must set aside all suspicious envelopes, the daily Segodnia reported. Sweden, meanwhile, said it would increase its stockpile of smallpox vaccine amid fears that terrorists might someday use that disease as a weapon. It will take about six months to build up a supply that can counter a massive threat, said Peet Tuell of the National Board of Health and Welfare. In the United States, a Washington postal worker has fallen ill with inhalation anthrax, a rare and lethal form of the disease, and five others are sick with suspicious symptoms. The diagnosed man is the third person in the United States to come down with the most serious form of the disease Six others, including two postal workers in New Jersey, have been infected with a highly treatable form that is contracted through the skin. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33840-2001Oct22.html

Russia's killer anthrax under lock and key By Jon Boyle, Reuters, 10/22/01 MOSCOW - While anthrax scares sweep the United States, Russia has for centuries lived with the killer bacterium and says it has deadly "super bug" strains developed by the Soviet war machine under lock and key. At its height, 70,000 people worked on the Soviet germ warfare program, including 9,000 scientists and engineers who turned anthrax, the plague and smallpox into weapons of mass destruction, U.S.-based experts say. But the 15-20 Russians who each year contract anthrax succumb to a naturally occurring variety. "We call anthrax Siberian Ulcer because it has been in Siberia since ancient times," said Vladimir Orlovsky, head doctor at the infectious diseases ward at the Vektor Research Institute in the Urals town of Koltsovo. "For Americans it may be an exotic disease, but for us it isn't." At the start of the 20th century, Russia recorded 60,000-70,000 cases of the suppurating skin sores in cattle each year, and 14,000-20,000 cases in people, 20 percent of which ended in death, said Benjamin Cherkassky, Russia's premier anthrax specialist. Poor hygiene and the collapse of veterinary systems with the fall of the Soviet Union mean that farm and leather industry workers still contract the illness today, he said. NO RUSSIAN LINK Germ warfare experts say the anthrax strain that has sown panic in the United States is indigenous to the United States, for the weapons-grade strain designed for Soviet biological bombs would have been much more lethal. In the last few weeks there have been at least nine confirmed cases of anthrax in the United States, one of them fatal. Twenty-eight U.S. Senate staff members have tested positive for exposure to the bacterium after an anthrax-laced letter was sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle last week. "If the anthrax (being spread in America) had been a real (biological weapon) strain, then I think that the Capitol Hill staff would have all been placed in emergency wards and would have died within two days," independent Russian biological weapons expert Lev Fyodorov said. "The biological weapon strain of anthrax is potent -- 100 percent death rate." Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Bush pledged at the weekend to prevent nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction being used for terrorism. No formal link has yet been made between the spate of anthrax-laced letters and other incidents in the United States with Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind Sept. 11 hijacked airliner attacks on New York and Washington. STOCKPILES SECURED Russian, European and U.S. experts say they believe that germs in the stockpiles Russia inherited from the Soviet Union are not accessible to people seeking to launch similar attacks. "You might not love Russia and its bureaucratic system," said Fyodorov, "but right from the start, when the work on bio-warfare started in the Soviet Union, security measures were taken." "And these security measures have only been strengthened over the years, not weakened. I just don't see how evil- doers could get around these measures," he said. Western experts concur. Jan van Aken, head of the Sunshine Project in Hamburg, a nongovernmental group that studies biological weapons, said fears of a "brain-drain" of Soviet-trained scientists to "rogue states" were misplaced. "The Western world, the United States and the European Union, spent a lot of money diverting the former biological weapon facilities in Russia to civilian biomedical research. "The best scientists in the program are probably either still in Russia or in western universities," he said. In the early 1990s the United States launched a multimillion-dollar program to keep such researchers in jobs not related to biological weapons. Matthew Meselson, a Harvard University expert who has sat on government panels on biological weapons, said: "I've never had any briefings where I've been told we suspect the Russians (of proliferating biological weapons know-how)." http://www.boston.com/news/daily/22/anthrax_russia.htm

Companies focus on smallpox vaccine

NEW YORK: In the highly profitable pharmaceutical business, vaccines have long been the low-rent cousin — never matching the profits or prominence of medicines.

That has changed significantly since Sept. 11. Now vaccines have got the attention, but it's unclear if dollars will follow.

New fears of bio-terrorism have led the government to announce it wants to purchase 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine, enough to inoculate every American against the deadly disease.

Many drug makers have shied away from making vaccines in the past; vaccines can be as costly as drugs to develop, but don't offer the same returns.

When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was seeking a firm to manufacture smallpox vaccine last year, it was spurned by major drug companies, and the $343 million contract for 40 million doses fell to a previously obscure British firm, Acambis.

Now more drug companies are offering their services, and the government said it would spend $509 million on additional doses. But that's hardly a windfall in an industry where sales are expected to reach $178 billion this year, according estimates by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.

The United States has 15 million doses of smallpox vaccine, and has ordered an additional 14 million from Acambis, on top of the original 40 million. The company now expects to have its first doses ready by 2002, two years earlier than originally planned.

But experts say much more is needed. In the wake of recent anthrax cases, concerns have grown about security at the Russian lab that has one of the two remaining smallpox virus samples.

"We couldn't contain an outbreak" said GiGi Kwik, a fellow at the John Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies.

A smallpox epidemic would be much worse than an anthrax outbreak, because smallpox is contagious and more deadly than anthrax. Roughly 30 percent of those who contract smallpox die. A large portion of the U.S. population has never been vaccinated and no one knows if those inoculated have retained their immunity.

Smallpox vaccination stopped in the United States in 1972, and the disease was eradicated by 1980. That meant many major pharmaceutical companies stopped producing the vaccine because it wasn't considered a major public health threat, and no market was foreseen.

Other factors also kept drug companies from making vaccines for smallpox or other bio-terrorist threats such as Ebola.

Lehman Brothers analyst Tony Butler estimates the gross margin on a drug is about 90 percent compared to 70 percent to 80 percent for a vaccine. Drugs also generate more sales — medicines are often taken two and three times daily for years. Vaccines are typically given one to five times over a lifetime.

Butler said it's difficult for vaccine developers to choose promising candidates. Companies must determine if the demand for a vaccine is great enough, or if the affected population could afford the treatment. The same is true for drugs, but medicines are given to sick people while vaccines are given to healthy people.

"You know who should get a cancer drug, but who should really get the vaccine?" asked Butler.

In addition, vaccines can have side effects that pose risk of litigation. Experts say if healthy people get sick after taking a vaccine they are much more likely to win juror sympathy than a sick person developing complications from a drug.

Lawsuits by parents who assert their children were hurt by vaccines were so widespread that in 1988 the government set up the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to handle the complaints.

"When an individual is sick and seeks treatment there is a certain amount of risk associated with the treatment. The risk assessment is totally different with a healthy person," said Dr. Adel Mahmoud, president of Merck & Co.'s vaccine division.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., is working on a massive bioterrorism package worth $5 billion to $10 billion. That includes money to hasten vaccine production and ease antitrust restrictions for drug companies.

"There is just so much to do," said Kwik. "There was not a real interest in this because there was no market. My impression is that the drug companies don't do anything unless there is a profit."

But others have a more optimistic view. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday that the government could have enough vaccine for everyone in the nation within six to 12 months. ( AP ) http://www.timesofindia.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=2112973388

DefenseNews.com October 22, 2001 Key U.S. Senator Against Unilateral Withdrawal From ABM Treaty By Tom Canahuate, DefenseNews.com Staff Writer WASHINGTON — The United States is unlikely to withdraw unilaterally from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty at the end of the year given the need for continued Russian support for the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan against Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida network, said the chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee. "Russia is very critical to our effort in Afghanistan," Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., told the American Jewish Committee in an Oct. 22 speech here. The committee chairman said Russia paved the way for the U.S. military to operate from bases in Uzbekistan and is providing other crucial support in the antiterrorism effort. The subject of the ABM treaty was a major item on the agenda during an Oct. 21 bilateral meeting in Shanghai, China, between U.S. President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Bush wants to move beyond the 1972 treaty, which restricts the development and testing of a missile defense system designed to protect the entire country. Condoleezza Rice, U.S. national security adviser, said Bush reiterated in his meeting with Putin the need for the United States and Russia to develop a new strategic framework and move beyond the ABM treaty. "He said this is a matter of some urgency because he believes that the important thing is to begin to explore the technologies that will allow us to get to the place that we can build limited defenses," Rice said in an Oct. 21 news briefing in Shanghai. DefenseNews.com obtained a transcript of the briefing. She said Bush gave Putin no deadline for withdrawing from the treaty. Levin said the Bush administration would like to withdraw from the treaty by the end of the year, but cautioned the president not to "unilaterally withdraw from the ABM treaty." He said a planned November U.S.-Russian summit in the United States could help both countries move away from the treaty together. Levin warned, however, that if the United States withdraws unilaterally, then "when they can afford it, and someday they will, Russia will build up its nuclear arsenal and develop countermeasures to any U.S. missile defense." Despite indications of progress in U.S.-Russian talks on the 1972 treaty, Putin said in an Oct. 21 news briefing, "We believe it is an important element of stability in the world." DefenseNews.com obtained a transcript of Putin’s briefing. In terms of Russian support for U.S. actions in Afghanistan, Rice said Russia has been very forthcoming in intelligence support and offering to help in search and rescue missions. "We consider Russia a full partner in the coalition for the war on terrorism."

Los Angeles Times October 22, 2001 Disarming Biological Weapons Civil defense: Research lab experts adapt their experience to develop defenses for anthrax and other bacteria. By Tim Reiterman, Times Staff Writer LIVERMORE, Calif. -- Behind barbed wire and guarded gates, in spartan buildings identified by numbers, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are using expertise from nuclear weapons work to hone the nation's defenses for the new war against terrorism. In several months, officials say firefighters, police and other emergency workers should be able to respond to the scene of a possible biological attack with a hand-held mini-DNA lab developed here. Within half an hour, they would know whether anthrax bacteria or diseases such as plague are present. If a dangerous substance is detected, emergency workers could blanket it with a special gel developed by Lawrence researchers to kill biological agents and neutralize chemicals without harming people. Further down the road, scientists plan to deploy a second device that could constantly monitor and analyze the air in a convention hall, subway or even an entire city--and send out an alarm if pathogens reach a trigger level. Already, following the Sept. 11 attacks, Lawrence officials have installed a less advanced system of biocollectors in one undisclosed city. Lawrence Livermore, a low-rise complex rambling across this East Bay suburb of tract homes, malls and rolling grasslands, was at the fountainhead of the Cold War. Researchers here played key roles in building the nation's nuclear arsenal. But for several years in the wake of the Cold War, the lab has quietly pursued counter-terrorism research. Now that mission has taken on added urgency and importance. The chemical and biological warfare research at Livermore offers a glimpse of the government's efforts to build future defenses against what some call "the poor man's atomic bomb." It also shows how one of the nation's most prominent nuclear weapons facilities has positioned itself to help wage a costly struggle against terrorism that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says could last as long as the Cold War. Concerns about the country's biological weapons preparedness escalated after the 1991 Persian Gulf War when United Nations inspectors found that Iraq's biological arsenal included anthrax and other agents. The U.S. had no way to perform prompt field detection and identification of deadly biological agents to protect military personnel, let alone civilians back home. Detection often remains painfully slow. When aides to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle reported last week that their office had received an envelope containing a suspicious powder, it took much of the day to determine that the substance contained anthrax spores. To address such shortcomings, Congress in 1996 authorized the Energy Department to establish programs to counter domestic terrorism. And Lawrence was one of the labs that expanded its bio-defense work. "Since Sept. 11, things have changed dramatically," said Page Stoutland, the lab's deputy division leader for counter- biological terrorism. "We feel an increased sense of urgency, so we are doing everything we possibly can to accelerate development of detectors and our other work." Lawrence, run by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy, still spends most of its budget on its nuclear missions. The lab devoted about $14 million last year to chemical and biological national security work-- about 1% of its $1.3-billion budget. "It's obviously not enough," said Michael O'Hanlon, a senior analyst at the Brookings Institution. "Counter-terrorism work has the real potential for being one of the four or five key themes for research" by Lawrence and other national labs in the post-Cold War era. Lawrence officials acknowledge that they might have developed anti-terrorism devices more rapidly if they had more money. The Energy Department's proposed budget for the 2002 fiscal year originally called for cutting the nationwide budget for chemical and biological national security by about 30%. But lab officials say they are hopeful that they will now get a portion of a $63-million budget request from the department's National Nuclear Security Agency made after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Many counter-terrorism projects here flow from Lawrence's nuclear research, including the study of fallout patterns and radiation's effects on the human body, said Wayne Shotts, associate director of nuclear nonproliferation, arms control and international security. The starting point was an effort by Lawrence and other government-funded laboratories to identify fingerprint-like genetic signatures for the most likely biological weapons. For security reasons, officials decline to identify all substances being studied but confirm that they include plague and anthrax. The portable, battery-powered Hand-Held Advanced Nucleic Acid Analyzer, which measures about 10 inches long and 4 inches wide, is one outgrowth of that research. The device is configured to analyze several samples on the scene within 30 minutes--a fraction of the time laboratory analysis normally takes. The samples are placed in tiny test tubes, then subjected to a DNA analysis. Smiths Group Protection and Detection Systems, based outside Baltimore, has acquired the right to manufacture and distribute the device, providing royalties to the university. Originally, the target date for commercial sale was mid-2002. Now, the schedule has been pushed forward, and the device should be in full production by April, said Sam Lucas, the company's marketing and development director. The company initially projected it would sell up to 2,000 units over three years. Only a relatively small number of local emergency response agencies thought they could afford an instrument that might cost $15,000 to $20,000 and be rarely deployed, Lucas said. That attitude shifted after hijacked planes hit the Pentagon and World Trade Center. Inquiries quadrupled. Agencies started saying, "We'll spend what it takes." So far, the device has limitations, said Bert Weinstein, the lab's associate director of biology. Proper operation requires a fair amount of training, and it can test for only a limited number of potential biological warfare agents. "These devices are still in their infancy," said Ken Ewing, a senior research scientist at the Battelle Memorial Institute who analyzed commercial detection equipment for the U.S. Justice Department. "You're not going to plop in a sample, push a button and then the machine will spit out the answer." Another device at Lawrence--the Autonomous Pathogen Detection System--is probably a year or two from production, officials say. The prototype--with an air intake and computer monitor atop a maze of wires, tubes and chemical tanks--sucks in air, then collects particles in a liquid for analysis. The results appear on a computer screen every 30 minutes. The device currently is coded to detect seven bacteria or viruses, but researchers hope to increase that to 25 to 50. "It functions like a smoke detector," said Richard Langlois, senior biomedical scientist. "But it gives alarms and could be set up in a convention hall or subway. "You don't know what a terrorist would use, and it may be colorless and tasteless," said Langlois. "This [device] could give an early warning and save many lives." To protect a complex of buildings, or a city, a network of the devices could be linked to an emergency response center, researchers say. Meantime, Lawrence has placed a non-automated detection system in an undisclosed major city following the recent attacks. The Biological Aerosol Sentry and Information System employs air collectors at multiple locations, but samples must be retrieved and brought to a mobile DNA lab for analysis. Another challenge has been to find a substance that could decontaminate areas without harming people and the environment. Lawrence scientists devised a spray that accomplished that in field testing by the Defense Department. The active ingredient is peroxymonosulfate--a substance used in some denture cleaners that is about as caustic as vinegar. But researchers say it kills biological agents and neutralizes chemical ones. When transported, the silica-based substance is in gel form and is unlikely to spill. When stirred, the gel becomes a liquid. When sprayed, the substance turns back into a gel that can adhere to walls, ceilings and other surfaces. After it dries, the powdery residue can be vacuumed or steam-cleaned, or simply left in place. The gel could be applied from the air over large areas, such as a stadium, or sprayed by hand in subways and buildings. "The hazardous materials team would go into the contaminated area . . . and spray the area that was visually contaminated right away," said Ellen Raber, head of Lawrence's environmental protection department, describing how the gel would work. Within 30 to 40 minutes, the area would be decontaminated, and within four hours, the gel would be dry, she said. Scientists also have been conducting drills that predict how plumes of airborne chemical or biological agents would travel through major U.S. cities. Lawrence has applied the technology to predict fallout paths from the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986, and the Kuwaiti oil field fires in 1991. More recently, the lab helped California health workers by plotting the course of smoke from major tire fires. The computer model can be programmed to assess terrorist releases worldwide, from the Grand Canyon to urban "street canyons," whether they involve explosion, fire or even crop dusters. "We can do a scenario at any altitude and any release rate," said Jim Ellis, head of the National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center. The model already has been used, Ellis said, to plan evacuation routes for heads of state attending major events. Such new uses of nuclear-related technologies were envisioned long ago, said Shotts. "The lab . . . early on recognized that the science and technology it supported could also be important to other national missions [such as] terrorism," he said. Times staff writer Stephanie Simon in St. Louis contributed to this article.

Washington Times October 22, 2001 Pg. 16 Anthrax Stirs U.S. Review Of Foreign Germs Programs By Nicholas Kralev It was late May 1992 and Boris N. Yeltsin was about to fly to Washington for the first official U.S.-Russian summit since the collapse of the Soviet Union six months earlier. Grateful to the United States for its support during his power struggle with a die-hard Communist clique during the final days of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mr. Yeltsin wanted to show President George Bush a spirit of cooperation and openness about Moscow's secretive past. So one of the new president's senior aides whispered to a Russian newspaper reporter who was preparing to interview Mr. Yeltsin a suggestion for an unusual question. It involved a 1979 anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk, Mr. Yeltsin's hometown, now called Yekaterinburg, where he was then head of the Communist Party. In answering the question, Mr. Yeltsin made a startling revelation: The epidemic, which killed nearly 70 people, had not been caused by meat from infected livestock, as he and other officials had insisted at the time, but by a leak at a secret biological-weapons facility maintained by the military. The incident had aroused suspicions in the West, but Moscow had never before acknowledged the research site, whose existence was a clear violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. Mr. Yeltsin said he had never before disclosed the real reason for the anthrax outbreak because no one had asked him about it. Although the Russian president's admission ranked lower than the bombshells he would later become notorious for dropping, the U.S. scientific community took note of it. It finally began to grasp the scope and potential threat of the Soviet germ-warfare program. Other research funded The future of more than two dozen research centers, production plants and storage facilities, as well as that of over 25,000 people working for the program, greatly alarmed the United States. It quickly decided to finance research for health and other peaceful purposes "to prevent the proliferation of weapons expertise," said a State Department official who helped create the U.S. funding program and is still deeply involved in it. "At the time, the term everybody used was 'brain drain,'" another State Department official said. "We wanted to keep those scientists and engineers at home and reasonably comfortable, so they wouldn't want to move to Iran and North Korea or contract with countries that have proliferation programs." As the United States copes with the danger of biological warfare, which now seems more imminent than ever before, investigators and experts are taking a fresh look at the biological-warfare capabilities of other countries, seeking the sources of the anthrax found in a number of letters over the last couple of weeks. U.S. officials, who are also examining potential domestic sources, say that while foreign governments may not necessarily be behind the current anthrax offensive, help from such quarters to initiators of the attacks cannot be ruled out. Between 13 and 17 countries are believed to have active biological-warfare programs, according to differing data from several government agencies, including the State and Defense departments and the Office of Technology Assessment. Not surprisingly, Iraq is No. 1 on the list of potential state sponsors of bioterrorism, experts said in interviews last week. North Korea is another theoretical, though much less likely, possibility, they said. "If a state was involved, Iraq is clearly on top of the list," said Michael L. Moodie, president of the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute. "North Korea is thought to have worked on anthrax and one can argue that it's using the situation, but it's a much less likely option than Iraq." Pathogens sent to Iraq American and other Western companies exported "pathogens and production equipment" to Iraq in the 1980s for "legitimate peaceful scientific research," said Elisa Harris, who was director of nonproliferation on President Bill Clinton's National Security Council. Those initially small quantities were eventually stockpiled by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and used to produce weapons. The question now, Mrs. Harris said, is whether it's "in Saddam's interest to risk his regime's survival" by providing assistance to terrorist groups. The Bush administration has not excluded the possibility of a link between the anthrax scares and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. Mr. Moodie said bin Laden "has articulated a rationale" for using biological weapons and al Qaeda apparently has "the necessary set of skills, resources and organizational capability" to acquire them. The administration has been careful not to blame Iraq for collaborating with bin Laden without clear evidence. Reports have emerged, however, that Mohamed Atta, one of the 19 hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague last year. Washington had substantial knowledge of Baghdad's biological capabilities until three years ago, when they were virtually dismantled by a U.N. special commission that worked on disarming Iraq. But Saddam is believed to have rebuilt his germs program after he expelled the inspectors in 1998. Diversion also possible Mr. Moodie said state involvement in the anthrax mail cases may not be limited to a government's "policy decision," and the hazardous materials might have been acquired "from a poorly secured stock." This is why many experts are concerned about the former Soviet Union's bioweapons program, which was the largest in the world and continued to exist even after President Richard M. Nixon unilaterally suspended the American program in 1969. More than 20 years later, having discovered that it had been lied to for decades, the United States set out to destroy the Soviet bioweapons legacy and use the deadly skills of thousands of scientists, engineers and lab workers for health and other peaceful research. The U.S. funding program originated in the first Bush administration, but the first amount of money wasn't committed until 1994, a year into the Clinton presidency. Since then, Washington has spent $41 million on the program, which covered 5,400 people, said the senior State Department official involved in the effort. The "primary target population," or those "with enough information to be worried about," is between 7,000 and 9,000, the official said. "Other important objectives of the program were support for Russia's transition to a market economy, solution of national and international technical problems and integration into the world scientific community, with all the transparency that goes along with that," she said. In the late 1990s, Russia provided access to some of its biological facilities, the most publicized of which was the one in Obolensk, about 50 miles southwest of Moscow, where the Russian government allowed even American journalists. Obolensk was part of a secret organization known as Biopreparat and specialized in anthrax and plague. An institute in Koltsova, in Siberia, dealt with hemorrhagic fevers and Venezuelan encephalitis. In Leningrad, now again St. Petersburg, studies were done on tularemia, according to press accounts. 'Unresolved questions' But despite Moscow's willingness to reveal some formerly well-guarded secrets, it hasn't been forthcoming enough, Mr. Moodie said. "There are still unresolved questions, and the Russians need to be more transparent," he said. "They haven't provided access everywhere and have been less open about their military programs." The U.S. funding effort, which gradually involved half a dozen government agencies and is appropriated annually, was administered by the International Science and Technology Center (ISTC) in Moscow. "We agreed to use ISTC as a mechanism with well-established oversight and audit process, which is very important, and a way to engage the Europeans, Japanese and others in some of those projects," the State Department official said. "Any individual or institute that was in the past involved in [bioweapons] activities is eligible to make proposals for a research project." The official explained that the U.S. program "spends its money on a project-by-project basis — it's not a U.N. fund where we offer the money into a pot and some committee decides where it goes." Most of the money is "paid directly to individual bank accounts that are set up for participating scientists, so there are tens of thousands of bank accounts under the program." A "procurement office" has been set up for equipment purchases with standard, competitive procedures, and all travel is coordinated by another special office, she said. Although recipients of U.S. funds are banned from working with countries that have proliferation programs or terrorists, administration officials admitted that there is no way to know what a scientist does in his or her office after hours. There is no reason to believe, however, that any beneficiary of U.S. assistance in Russia has helped foreign germ-warfare programs, they said. Trying to keep tabs "There is an intangible there, but if we are not in the environment, we are totally ignorant of what that environment is," the State Department official said. "If we are in it, at least we have that much of a picture of what's going on, who is involved. That has always been the rather stark choice: Is it risky to be in? Of course. Is it riskier not to be in? Absolutely." The United States has also been working with other former Soviet republics on destroying their biological-weapons capabilities, she said. An anthrax production facility in Kazakhstan, the only one of its kind outside Russia, now looks like "a colossal junkyard" — all essential equipment "has either been dismantled or rendered unusable." Anthrax is "an extremely common bacterium," she said, "and I'd bet a large amount of money that if we sent a team to the president's ranch in Crawford, Texas, they would identify anthrax, because its everywhere. We can track it down to type and whether it's genetically engineered, but it's not like nuclear forensics. Trying to analyze where a 1- to-5-micron piece of powder originated is much more difficult, unless we find the perpetrators." Since Sept. 11, "we have been flooded with offers of assistance" from the Russians, the official said. "In fact, I'm getting data on experiments they are running on 'Can you really use microwave ovens to kill anthrax in mail?' I remember my first trip to one of these facilities — foggy morning, police escort — and now they are e-mailing me the results of their anthrax-killing experiments. It's remarkable." Last week, Russian Health Minister Yuri Shevchenko said Moscow could help with medicines and vaccines. One institute in the city of Saratov in the Volga region has already offered help. "We certainly welcome the spirit behind that offer, the spirit of solidarity," U.S. ambassador Alexander Vershbow told a news conference. "And as the problem in the United States continues, I wouldn't exclude that we will be seeking assistance from our Russian friends." Yesterday, President Bush and Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, pledged during a meeting in Shanghai to prevent nuclear, biological and chemical weapons from being used for terrorism and to stop funds that aid those involved. "The presidents of the two countries are fully resolved to increase cooperation in the fight against new terrorist threats in the nuclear, chemical and biological fields, as well as in the field of computers," said a statement issued by the Kremlin after the meeting.

New York Times October 22, 2001 Sept. 11 Attacks Led To Push For More Smallpox Vaccine By Judith Miller and Sheryl Gay Stolberg In late September, in the days before a series of anthrax-tainted letters made bioterrorism a reality in the United States, President Bush decided that the federal government should acquire enough vaccine to protect every American against an even more menacing biological threat: smallpox. Although smallpox was eradicated as a disease in the 1970's, American intelligence had suspected for years that Iraq and North Korea, and possibly other rogue nations, had maintained clandestine stocks of the deadly smallpox virus. But officials say it was the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and not any new information, that prompted the president's decision to greatly expand the nation's smallpox vaccine stockpile. The decision, which was not publicly announced, gained urgency when letters containing potentially lethal anthrax powder began arriving at news organizations and on Capitol Hill. The anthrax scares produced widespread fears that the nation would run short of the antibiotic Cipro. So senior administration officials quietly sped up their timetable for acquiring the smallpox vaccine. Last Wednesday, Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced the plan, which calls for stockpiling the vaccine so that it can be used in the event of an outbreak of smallpox, a highly contagious disease for which there is no treatment, and that kills one-third of all people infected with it. "I think the American people will feel much more comfortable knowing they have their name on a vaccine shot in our inventory," Mr. Thompson said in an interview. "It's the security of knowing you have enough for every American." The decision to buy 300 million doses will vastly accelerate an existing vaccine program that, in the view of many scientists and federal officials, was hampered by bureaucratic inefficiency and was moving much too slowly. It also illustrates just how concerned officials have become about the nation's preparedness for a bioterrorism attack. Despite Mr. Thompson's public pronouncements on Sept. 30 that the government "can handle any contingency right now," interviews with nearly a dozen administration officials, scientists and bioterrorism experts make clear that in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, both the health secretary and the White House privately were acutely aware of the nation's vulnerabilities. Even so, it was not until Oct. 4 — just hours before Mr. Thompson announced to the nation that a Florida man had become sick with pulmonary anthrax — that he secured Mr. Bush's commitment to pay for his entire $1.6 billion bioterrorism preparedness package. "It was the double whammy of the World Trade Center and the anthrax attack that made everybody realize that these are real problems that need to be dealt with," said Peter B. Jahrling, an Army scientist who is one of the nation's leading smallpox researchers. "In all my years of government service, I have never seen anything move this fast." Mankind's triumph over smallpox is considered public health's greatest accomplishment. After the World Health Organization officially declared in 1980 that the disease had been eradicated, countries were supposed to destroy their stocks of the smallpox virus and transfer any samples of it two repositories, one in Russia and the other in the United States, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. By the early 1990's, the United States had about 15 million doses of aging smallpox vaccine that had been made by Wyeth Laboratories. It was too little to protect civilians and military forces, but few civilian scientists believed that the disease would ever re-emerge. The military, however, thought otherwise. In 1989, Vladimir Pasechnik, a top Soviet biologist, defected to Britain. In briefings later shared with American military intelligence analysts, he described the Soviet Union's empire of thousands of scientists and dozens of secret cities and facilities devoted to turning germs and viruses, including smallpox, into weapons. And he said Moscow was trying to modify smallpox into an even more efficient killer. These accusations, bolstered by the 1992 defection to the United States of Ken Alibek, the No. 2 scientist in the secret Soviet program, led American scientists at the Army's biological defense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., to press for the development of a more modern vaccine. In 1997, the Pentagon awarded a contract to DynPort, an American- British company, to do just that. The next year, a special panel of experts urged President Bill Clinton to start a vaccine program for civilians. Because vaccination was stopped in 1972, and immunization against smallpox lasts only 15 to 20 years, Americans are especially vulnerable, experts say. At the Department of Health and Human Services, Margaret A. Hamburg oversaw the smallpox effort. Administration officials worried that they would not get support for the plan in Congress. "A lot of people thought this was a crazy idea, to make new vaccine when the disease didn't exist," Dr. Hamburg said. At the White House, Richard A. Clarke, President Clinton's counterterrorism coordinator, wanted the Pentagon and the health agency to join forces. But the Pentagon refused to share the seed strain for its program with the civilian program. In an interview last summer, a spokesman for the office charged with making the vaccine, the Joint Vaccine Acquisition Program, said there were legal impediments to cooperating with a civilian contractor. Among other factors, he said, product liability was a concern. "These were two diametrically opposite bureaucracies that had no history of dealing with one another," said Mr. Clarke, who now leads Mr. Bush's office to protect the nation against Internet threats. The result was two separate smallpox vaccination programs. The military contract with DynPort called for 300,000 doses at a cost of $22 million, or initially about $70 a dose, to be delivered around 2005 or 2006. The civilian contract, which was awarded to OraVax, a Massachusetts-based company that has since been acquired by Acambis, a British concern, called for 40 million doses to be delivered by 2005, at a cost of $343 million, at about the same time as the military vaccine. One senior administration official called the situation "an utter mess." Even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration was determined to straighten the problem out. In June, a team of bioterrorism experts, led by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies, conducted an exercise code-named Dark Winter that simulated an outbreak of smallpox in the United States. As the imaginary epidemic spread, growing grimmer and grimmer, the government quickly ran out of vaccine. "After Dark Winter, there was a whole spate of briefings, so that a whole lot of people suddenly began to realize just how serious an epidemic of this sort could be," said Dr. Donald A. Henderson, who directs the center at Johns Hopkins and led the global effort to eradicate smallpox. On Sept. 16, Mr. Thompson brought Dr. Henderson into his inner circle of advisers. The men met for the first time that day. "This was a man deeply troubled and very worried," Dr. Henderson recalled. Mr. Thompson acknowledged as much. "Where will they hit us if they're going to hit us again?" he remembered thinking. By this time, Mr. Thompson was already pressing the White House to improve the nation's bioterrorism defenses. He found allies there among several officials who were steeped in biodefense. I. Lewis Libby, a top Pentagon lawyer in the first Bush administration who is now Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser, arranged for his boss to see a video of the Dark Winter exercise on Sept. 20. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, who directs a National Security Council program to defend against weapons of mass destruction, was also supportive. Officials said the vice president was so alarmed by the exercise that he raised the smallpox vaccine issue at a National Security Council meeting later that day. "The vice president was pushing it, and the president was going along with it," a senior administration official said. Within Mr. Thompson's circle of advisers, however, there was serious debate about whether 300 million doses were actually needed. Dr. Henderson's group at Johns Hopkins had estimated that only 100 million to 135 million doses would be needed to curtail an outbreak, and people familiar with the discussion say Dr. Henderson argued that money might be better spent on improving the public health infrastructure. Others argued that the government needed a dose for every American, if only to avert panic. Among them was Michael T. Osterholm, a public health expert who is also advising Mr. Thompson. He declined to talk about the deliberations, but said, "There is a certain psychological benefit to knowing that, in this country, there is a dose of vaccine for everybody if we need it." The secretary agreed and, sometime after Sept. 20, secured verbal approval from the president for the program. On Oct. 3, Mr. Thompson announced that his agency had arranged for Acambis to speed up its work and deliver the doses by the end of next summer. The next day, anthrax hit America. As the news was breaking in Florida that a man there was sick with pulmonary anthrax, a disease not seen in this country for a quarter- century, Mr. Thompson was at the White House, briefing the president and vice president on his bioterrorism plans. Officials say that briefing was a pivotal moment. The president committed the $1.6 billion for the broad antibioterrorism package. When it was over, Mr. Thompson briefed the press about the anthrax infection. Over the next several days, it became clear that the case was a deliberate attempt at anthrax poisoning. "When the anthrax hit, it was like, whoof!" Dr. Henderson said. "Sort of like a blow in the stomach." The next Monday, Oct. 8, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, received an order from Mr. Thompson's chief deputy, Claude Allen. His mission, Dr. Fauci said, was "to determine the scientific and technical feasibility of rapidly expanding the production of smallpox vaccine." That Friday, a collection of the nation's top scientists and public health officials gathered in Dr. Fauci's office on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. They included representatives from the Food and Drug Administration, the disease control centers and Dr. Fauci's institute, as well as Dr. Jahrling, the Army scientist. "It was a high state of adrenaline," Dr. Fauci recalled. He remembered telling the assembled scientists: "We have been given a task. We are going to get it done, and we are going to get it done on time. Failure is not an option." One concern, he and others said, was that the administration was taking a risk by relying on just one company, Acambis, to make the smallpox vaccine. So by this time, officials from Mr. Thompson's office were already meeting with other vaccine manufacturers, including Merck and Baxter International, which has a 20 percent stake in Acambis, to determine whether they would help in the effort. "I think you want to diversify the risk," Dr. Jahrling said. "In a world where planes hit trade centers and the whole thing comes crashing down, I think you probably want to make this stuff in more than one place." And while Dr. Fauci's institute was already running tests to see if the existing stockpile of 15 million doses could be safely diluted to create 75 million, everyone at the meeting agreed that was not good enough. By the time it was over, they had agreed to get a draft proposal for buying 300 million doses to Mr. Thompson by Oct. 17. "We were on a very fast track," Dr. Fauci said. So fast, in fact, that Mr. Thompson did not even wait for the draft to announce his plans. He did not need to, he said. The decision had already been made.

New York Times October 21, 2001 Preparing America For The Reality Of Germ Warfare By William J. Broad AMERICA is overreacting. Lost in the pandemonium over the recent anthrax attacks is good news: experts say the tainted letters are easy to detect, their effects easy to treat and their origins relatively easy to trace. Simple precautions involving the delivery and opening of mail, they say, can prevent further infections with the lethal germ. "This is the first biological threat that this country has had in modern times," the editors of ProMed, a Harvard-based news service of the International Society for Infectious Diseases, said last week. "Yes, mistakes are being made but the risks posed by the current series of events are really very small and readily treatable." Unlike the covert biological attacks often anticipated by weapon experts, the current strikes have also presented federal investigators with a surfeit of clues: envelopes, handwriting, cancellation dates, mail routes, potential finger prints, as well as the germs themselves. Paradoxically, the apparently high grade of at least some of the dry anthrax powders also helps, said Dr. David R. Franz, former commander of the Army's germ-defense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., and now vice president for chemical and biological defense at the Southern Research Institute, an arm of the University of Alabama. Dr. Franz and other experts in biological arms said federal investigators are likely to glean more clues about the origins of advanced powders than crude ones, especially since they've all been found to be the same strain. "It's sophisticated science, but it can be done," said Ken Alibek, a former Soviet germ warrior who is now president of Advanced Biosystems, Inc., a biodefense consulting company in Manassas, Va. Last week, federal scientists examining the anthrax tentatively concluded that the type is a domestic strain that bears no resemblance to the strains Russia and Iraq turned into biological weapons. They stressed, however, that the clues in no way rule out foreign work since the identified strain is available overseas. The scientists said the anthrax used in the attacks is similar to a highly virulent type known as the Ames strain, which was discovered in Iowa in 1980 (not in the 1950's as is sometimes reported). Reputedly, it is even more dangerous that the type the American military used. Looking at other characteristics of the anthrax powder -- the size of the particles, their shape, whether they have been damaged or deformed by milling, whether they carry a static charge that makes them stick together, whether chemical additives are present -- will tell investigators volumes about the terrorists. "WITH a crude preparation, there would be a large number of places to look for suspects," said Dr. Franz. An advanced one, he said, "narrows the field." Dr. Alibek said that the federal investigation, if done correctly, will yield huge insights into the perpetrators of the crimes. "Much information could be derived form these powders," he said, including serious clues about terrorist skills and origins. "We need," he said, "to establish a completely new kind of science." The bad news is that the letter attacks are small stuff compared to possible future threats, experts on biological weapons warn. At some point the issue may not be mass disruption but mass destruction. For example, a range of antibiotics -- including ciprofloxacin, penicillin and tetracyclines like doxycyline -- can rout anthrax if administered soon after exposure. But stealthy attacks might leave thousands of people unaware of biological time bombs ticking away inside their bodies. Amy E. Smithson, an expert on biological weapons at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a private group in Washington, has noted that anthrax spores by weight are far more deadly than nerve gas or nuclear arms. Before President Richard M. Nixon renounced germ warfare in 1969, for example, the United States Army produced dried anthrax, a single gallon of which could hold up to eight billion lethal doses -- enough in theory to kill every person on the planet, twice. But there is good news even when speaking of weapons of such mind-boggling power, said Dr. Franz. Quite simply, they are hard to deploy. FOR example, if terrorists were to use a crop duster to spread germs, they would face a number of problems. Cities generate heat, creating rising air currents that could carry anthrax germs high into the wind, diluting the microbes and making them less likely to kill. And the wind could, literally, blow the germs away. The technical obstacles to a mass-casualty attack are so high, Dr. Smithson of the Stimson Center told Congress, that the likelihood of failure has haunted even terrorists with "a wealth of time, money, and technical skill." In the end, then, recent events, nightmarish as they seem, should perhaps be regarded as offering a chance to learn how to cope more effectively with the danger of biological weapons. "One learns by mistakes," the ProMed editors wrote in an editorial. "If there is a next time, there will be far, far fewer errors and thus, hopefully, even less of an impact."

Washington Post October 24, 2001 Pg. 1 Anthrax Threat Takes A Wider Scope; New Cases Emerge; Some Mail Halted White House Facility Tainted; Postal Worker Infected in N.J. By Neely Tucker and Avram Goldstein, Washington Post Staff Writers The anthrax threat moving through the nation's postal system escalated yesterday as the number of people monitored for infection increased, spores of the bacterium were discovered on mail-sorting equipment that handles packages for the White House and several federal agencies abruptly discontinued mail delivery. In a day of rapidly unfolding events, government officials again sought to reassure the nation that the mail remains safe, even as they confronted more evidence that the postal system has been effectively used to spread anthrax. A postal worker in New Jersey was diagnosed with pulmonary anthrax, just one day after two D.C. postal workers died of anthrax and two others were diagnosed as being infected, offering a fatal trail of evidence that a stamped envelope may have been used as a lethal weapon. "Some 200 billion pieces of mail are sent every year, and until last month, not a single time had anthrax ever been mailed," said Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary. "So what's happened now is, frankly, just as you're seeing in the military a mobilization in Afghanistan, you're also seeing a nation at home mobilize." In Washington, now host to the most serious outbreak, the main postal facility is shuttered and considered a crime scene, all of the city's 36 neighborhood post offices are being tested for anthrax spores, incoming and outgoing mail at the Brentwood Road processing facility has been quarantined, and delivery has been disrupted in several Zip codes. City officials also moved to prepare a system to deliver antibiotics to wide swaths of the general population if contamination is found to be widespread. Taken together, the steps indicate health officials are considering that the perimeter of the anthrax threat may be far wider than previously believed. The focal point remains Brentwood, which processes all incoming and outgoing mail for the nation's capital, averaging a million pieces a day. The Postal Service last week hired a company to test the area that handles government mail and processed the one letter known to be contaminated. Results show that 14 of 29 spots have tested positive for anthrax spores. Federal health officials are now testing the entire facility, including the ventilation system. Three people have died of anthrax in the weeks since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and more than 50 have tested positive in nasal swab tests. The State Department issued a worldwide caution to Americans abroad yesterday, adding a warning that it cannot exclude the risk of anthrax attacks. "Reports of and confirmed cases of exposure to anthrax have caused an increase in anxiety over possible attacks using chemical and biological agents," the warning read. Domestically, medical tests yesterday confirmed that inhalation anthrax caused the deaths of two Brentwood postal workers, and a New Jersey postal worker was confirmed as having contracted the same illness. Their two facilities are known to have handled contaminated letters, including one addressed to NBC's Tom Brokaw in New York and another to Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.). D.C. Chief Medical Examiner Jonathan L. Arden concluded yesterday that postal worker Thomas L. Morris Jr., 55, died after the infection spread through his lungs, the chest cavity surrounding his heart and the lymph nodes. Two other Brentwood workers with anthrax infections are hospitalized in serious but stable condition at Inova Fairfax Hospital. Susan Matcha, an infectious disease specialist and the attending physician for both men, said an aggressive treatment of three antibiotics has kept them stable and breathing without help from ventilators. Both men have complained of shortness of breath since they were admitted to the hospital, but Matcha said they are able to talk. The conventional medical wisdom had been that inhalational anthrax is almost always fatal, but she said doctors hope to change that. "It's impossible to make a prognosis because there's so little medical literature to guide us," Matcha said yesterday. "But we are guardedly optimistic." D.C. Health Department Director Ivan C.A. Walks said at midday that 16 other Brentwood workers scattered across the Washington-Baltimore area are being observed by physicians because they have syndromes that could be precursors to inhalational anthrax. Four of the cases are considered "suspicious," and the patients have been hospitalized, he said. The 12 other cases, including some workers who have not been admitted to a hospital, have been labeled "very low suspicion." Since anthrax was named as the cause of death for a photo editor at the Sun tabloid in Boca Raton, Fla., anthrax spores have been discovered in the New York offices of NBC, CBS, ABC, the New York Post and the New Jersey mail facility that handled letters sent to those media outlets. On Capitol Hill, the bacterium has been found in the Hart building, the mailroom of the Dirsken Senate building, the mailroom at the Ford building, and at an off-site mail-screening center run by the U.S. Capitol Police. It has also been detected at the Brentwood processing facility. An evironmental sweep of the Capitol building completed yesterday showed no traces of anthrax, said Lt. Dan Nichols, spokesman for the Capitol Police. But of all the infected sites, it is Brentwood that is by far the most troubling to investigators. Rima Khabbaz, deputy director of the viral disease branch of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said scientists were confounded by the shifting understanding of how anthrax works. Before the Brentwood cases of inhalation anthrax, CDC scientists believed none of the other cases suggested that infection was a risk to mail handlers. Earlier evaluations, such as at the P and Half streets SE mail-screening center for the Capitol, were "completely reassuring," Khabbaz said. "The process to define risk is based on environmental sampling." "The Brentwood situation," she said, "has led us to reevaluate the science." Greg Poland, a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said that although "no envelope is airtight" and any powder inside could be squeezed out in processing, the probability of a significant number of anthrax spores escaping is low. But given that enough spores were present at Brentwood to infect four workers with the most serious kind of the disease, Poland said spores could conceivably also have passed from terrorist-sent mail to other mail moving through the facility, winding up in the homes and businesses of Washington. "The question is: Is it enough to cause a problem? Who knows?" Poland said. So far, he said, no anthrax cases have been caused by what he called "collateral mail." "We have to go with the observed risk, and the observed risk among the end recipients is so far zero," Poland said. How the two workers who died came down with the disease remains unknown. CDC officials said that they were unsure whether the letter to Daschle caused the contamination at Brentwood or whether spores were relased from other letters. Deborah Yackley, a postal spokeswoman, said Morris worked in an area at Brentwood that handles only government mail. She could not say where in the facility the other deceased worker, Joseph P. Curseen, 47, was assigned. One of the other infected Brentwood employees, Leroy Richmond of Stafford, works in an enclosed express mail sorting area, according to co-workers. He sorts mail on a conveyer belt and places it in bags depending on the address. Every day, he and several other postal workers travel to an air mail center near Baltimore-Washington International Airport where they sort express mail headed for Washington. Richmond then returns to the Brentwood Road facility and sorts express mail arriving from other locations, including Reagan National Airport and Dulles International Airport, co-workers said. The express mail area is enclosed, and other workers in that area report that neither they nor their colleagues have symptoms of anthrax -- leading them to wonder whether Richmond was exposed in a different part of the facility. Workers say they often are pulled out of the express mail area and assigned to other parts of the post office. The uncertainty over how the disease is spreading is being reflected in the region's emergency rooms, doctors said yesterday. After one postal worker went to a hospital over the weekend and was turned away because the staff thought he had the flu, doctors have switched to a very broad definition to decide who should be treated, they said yesterday. Anyone with flu-like symptoms -- an elevated white blood count, coughs, body aches, respiratory problems -- would be given antibiotics if they work in a high-risk profession or had "credible" exposure to anthrax bacteria. That includes people who work at postal facilities, general mailrooms, media organizations, government offices or Internet companies. Fears that more poisoned letters may be proliferating was evidenced on several fronts yesterday. At the White House, Fleischer said a concentration of anthrax spores was detected yesterday afternoon on a piece of mail equipment called a "slitter" at a Secret Service-controlled facility on property shared by the Anacostia Naval Station and Bolling Air Force Base, miles from the Oval Office. Fleischer said no tainted letter has been found at the facility, which processes 40,000 letters a week. Meanwhile, a sign of the times could be found at the Petworth Post Office at Ninth Street NW, handwritten in black marker on a white piece of paper: "Closed to be tested." As the day progressed, postal officials chartered buses to continue taking more than 2,000 postal employees to D.C. General Hospital for doses of antibiotics. The treated including D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) and his mother, who had visited the sorting rooms of the Brookland and Congress Heights post offices Friday. Several workers said they were particularly incensed that Daschle's office, and all of Capitol Hill, was shut down after anthrax spores were detected in his office. The facilities that processed the letter, in New Jersey and the District, were kept open. "Treatment should have started first for those who were handling the mail," said James Coe, a distribution clerk from the post office at 2121 Ward Pl. NW. "Where are the deaths? People handling the mail. Nobody's died in Congress yet." Among the Brentwood employees in area hospitals with suspicious symptoms is Charles Bragg, 36, of Indian Head, a maintenance worker who cleans various parts of the building. Initial tests indicate that he does not have anthrax, but he said doctors are keeping him at Washington Hospital Center as they await blood test results. "I had all the symptoms -- runny nose, coughing, headache," said Bragg, who went to the emergency room Monday. "They said since I have the flu-like symptoms, they just decided to keep me in here and put me on antibiotics. . . . Until they give me the final word [about test results], yes, I'm worried." Staff reporters Mike Allen, Justin Blum, Helen Dewar, Manny Fernandez, Carol D. Leonnig, Sylvia Moreno, Matthew Mosk, Michael E. Ruane, Leef Smith, Steve Twomey and Debbi Wilgoren and Metro staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.

USA Today October 24, 2001 Pg. 1 Anthrax, Weapons Compared Investigators look at Iraqi, Soviet samples to see whether they match letters' chemical mix By Steve Sternberg and Peter Eisler, USA Today Federal investigators are trying to determine whether a chemical mixture used in the anthrax mailed to the Capitol and news organizations matches samples of biological weapons stocks from Iraq, the former Soviet Union and other nations. The chemicals help the tiny anthrax spores to aerosolize, or float in the air, which increases the reach of the more lethal, inhaled form of the disease. Officials cautioned that the sophisticated chemical process doesn't necessarily mean that the U.S. attacks were state- sponsored. The senders may have obtained anthrax from existing weapons stockpiles, or been helped by a rogue scientist. "This has nothing to do with the organism itself and everything to do with how you (prepare) it," says Alan Zelicoff, a bioweapons expert at the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico who has been briefed on the scientific investigation. "For the first time in my 12 years in this arcane world, I'm suddenly very worried because they've been able to come up with aerosolized anthrax." Federal officials and bioweapons experts say the chemicals keep anthrax spores from clumping and getting weighed down by humidity. The anthrax can then spread like a tasteless, odorless, invisible gas. Zelicoff says whoever prepared the anthrax to magnify its deadly impact "has discovered the key to the kingdom." The material's composition is being compared with samples from foreign sources, officials say. U.S. labs possess anthrax produced for weapons use by Iraq and the former Soviet Union. "There's a lot of interest in what the material consists of and a feeling it might give us clues to where it might have come from," says D.A. Henderson, chairman of the Secretary of Health and Human Services' advisory committee on bioterrorism. Zelicoff says the clues may come from the "unique approach" used to make the anthrax so lightweight. Nearly 40 people have been exposed to anthrax through the tainted letters. Three have died, and nine others have developed the disease. One key question for investigators is whether the culprits were sponsored by a foreign state, worked with renegade scientists who once worked in a state-sponsored bioweapons program, or bought the anthrax on the black market. "Finding those kinds of compounds, it does speak to a higher level of sophistication — whoever is doing it really knows what they're doing," says Richard Spertzel, former head of biological weapons inspections in Iraq for the United Nations. The chemicals are readily available, he says. "The critical thing is knowing what to use, and how and when to use it." Experts warn that there may be many explanations. "We have to be very careful about making the jump to state sponsorship," says Michael Moodie, a former U.S. arms-control official who heads the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute.

New York Times October 24, 2001 Granules Sprayed On Coast Guard Post By The Associated Press JACKSON, Miss., Oct. 23 — A tiny Coast Guard post was dusted with white granules sprayed from a small plane, the second such incident in the state in four days, the authorities said. The latest incident happened on Monday afternoon at the Shore Side Detachment office in Natchez. A coast guardsman who was standing outside is being given antibiotics as a precaution, Petty Officer Third Class Joan Farris, a Coast Guard spokeswoman in New Orleans, said today. "They are not sure if it was a crop-duster," Petty Officer Farris said, adding that local, state and federal authorities had been notified and that a sample of the granules had been taken to a state laboratory for testing. Meanwhile, the authorities were awaiting final test results for a Mississippi River towboat and crew that were sprayed with an unknown substance by a crop- duster on Friday near Rosedale. Initial tests for chemical and biological agents were negative, and the 11 crew members and towboat were released from quarantine late Sunday. Witnesses said the plane near Rosedale was a crop-duster, though the authorities would not provide specifics about its color and design for comparison with the airplane in Monday's incident. Natchez is in southwest Mississippi, 170 miles south of Rosedale. The federal and state authorities searched crop-dusters' flight records for clues to the planes' identities. The F.B.I. is investigating, but a spokeswoman for the bureau said her office could not comment.

DefenseNews.com October 23, 2001 Lawlor To Be Pentagon Rep In New U.S. Homeland Security Office By Gail Kaufman, DefenseNews.com Staff Writer WASHINGTON — Army National Guard Maj. Gen. Bruce Lawlor will serve as the Pentagon’s representative to the new U.S. Office of Homeland Security, Pentagon sources told Defense News.com Oct. 23. The office, headed by former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, will have a staff of about 100, and most of those workers will be on assignment from more than 40 departments involved in security and emergency response efforts. Lawlor currently is commanding general of the Joint Task Force for Civil Support, based at Joint Forces Command, Norfolk, Va. His appointment by the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush to Ridge’s office and his replacement on the task force have not been officially announced. The Joint Task Force for Civil Support was established in 1999 to provide command and control over Defense Department forces in support of a lead federal agency, for weapons of mass destruction consequence management activities in the United States, its territories and possessions. Lawlor was assigned to the command in November 1999 to develop doctrine, training and exercise management and create requirements. The task force’s main effort is to ensure DoD assets are prepared to respond to requests for support from a lead federal agency, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in a crisis. Staff Writer Bridgette Blair contributed to this report.

Chicago Tribune October 22, 2001 Atomic Bomb Test Site Could Get War Role Nevada senator wants to create training center By V. Dion Haynes, Tribune national correspondent MERCURY, Nev. -- On a remote site the size of Rhode Island in a desert previously used for atomic bomb testing, some federal officials envision constructing mock office buildings, factories, houses and subways--and then blowing some of them up. They want to send into the rubble firefighters and police officers, who would have to face chemical or biological agents in their struggle to find victims. The urban rescue operation is the centerpiece of a proposal in Congress to turn the Nevada Test Site into the National Center for Combating Terrorism. About 1,200 recovery workers train at the test site every year. But Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is seeking $60 million in federal money to establish a center where experts could research and develop technology to better detect biological and chemical agents and where thousands more rescuers from across the country could train for disasters caused by weapons of mass destruction. Known as the place where atmospheric nuclear explosions sent huge mushroom clouds billowing into the sky during the Cold War, the test site offers trainees a big advantage: It is a remote, polluted area and the only place in the country where the emission of radiation and chemical agents for training exercises are allowed. "Like training for a sports game, you play like you practice," said Nathan Naylor, Reid's spokesman. "If you don't have the training, you're not going to be able to go out on the field and win." John Spahn, program manager for the Hazmat Spill Center at the site, said: "After a trainee has been in this environment for a few hours, it's no longer training--it's real." Surrounded by mountains on a 1,370-square-mile area scattered with cactus and sagebrush, the Nevada Test Site was the scene of nearly 1,000 underground and atmospheric explosions from the 1950s to the '80s. Vestiges of the past remain: Craters from the detonations, large enough to drive a vehicle through, are carved into the ground. Wooden bleachers on which reporters witnessed the blasts five decades ago are rotting in the sun. Some Quonset huts that once housed thousands of employees who worked at the site are used for offices. In 1992, President George Bush signed a moratorium on nuclear testing. Since then, Department of Energy officials, noting that only trace amounts remain of radiation from the atomic experiments, have marketed the site as a place where chemical companies could test hazardous materials, military officials could set off explosives and police and fire departments could hone their rescue skills. Responding to a flood of calls from rescue workers who suddenly felt ill-prepared in the wake of the terrorist attacks and anthrax threats, Reid is urging President Bush to sign an executive order increasing the training center's budget six-fold. To promote the proposal, federal officials last week led reporters on a rare tour through the test site and demonstrated a training exercise. Using two abandoned five-story aluminum tanks that once served as fueling stations for an experimental nuclear ramjet, training leaders set up a mock terrorist attack on a chemical plant. An explosion caused a release of "hazardous" chemicals at the factory. Police and rescue workers stormed the building, apprehending a suspect and treating victims. For the purposes of the demonstration no chemicals were used. But officials said low levels of hazardous materials are emitted in training exercises to help trainees adapt to real-life conditions. "When they're going through the experiment we put them in an environment with psychological and physical stresses. The stress causes the students to really produce," said Curt Wargo, a former captain in the New York Police Department and now senior operating specialist for the training program. "Police departments don't always have training facilities, and those that do are not as realistic as this one where you deal with real contaminants," he added. "Students always want to deal with the real thing." Because the proposal for the expanded counterterrorism center is in the conceptual stage, officials at the Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration are seeking feedback from police, firefighters and emergency medical technicians across the country on what they want to see. Officials say that most are interested in training in a World Trade Center scenario, wading through rubble, smoke and hazardous materials. Under federal law, the test site is authorized to emit hazardous materials as part of an effort to improve emergency planning. "We have a permit under the Clean Air Act that allows the facility to release 150 toxic chemicals into the environment. Our own limit is that we don't release chemicals that have residual effects," said James Barrett, senior adviser for national security in the National Nuclear Security Administration. "We wouldn't release [the nerve gas] sarin, but we can release a chemical with the same properties as sarin," Barrett added. "We're the only site in the country that the government allows to do this." Test site officials displayed a range of high-tech instruments that rescuers use to detect radiation and chemical contaminants. No reliable portable equipment is available for anthrax and biological agents, but test site officials say they hope the counterterrorism center would be used by researchers to develop such a device. Moreover, they want researchers to go a step further, developing "smart" buildings that could respond on their own to threats. "Smart compounds could be used to immunize a building and detector systems would allow it to respond to a threat that occurred inside," Barrett said. "This could involve the release of compounds to counteract the release of chemicals or biological threats in the building." Under the plan the new center would intensify its curricula and training methods. Rather than enroll individual rescuers, officials said, the idea would be to train police and fire departments collectively as a unit. "Sen. Reid has heard time and time again that police and firefighters are ill-prepared to handle an industrial chemical spill, let alone an intentional chemical or biological attack," Naylor said. "He wants them to train together because they will have to work hand in hand in a disaster."

Washington Post October 24, 2001 Pg. 1 Source Of Tainted Mail Remains Mystery Investigators Find No 'Conclusive Link' Between Anthrax Scare, Sept. 11 Attacks By Dan Eggen and Peter Slevin, Washington Post Staff Writers More than two weeks after Florida photo editor Bob Stevens died of anthrax, federal investigators still have no firm idea who is sending envelopes of the deadly microbe through the mail or what is motivating the attacks, according to lawmakers, public health experts and law enforcement officials. Hundreds of FBI agents and postal inspectors have been dispatched to New Jersey in an attempt to find the source of three letters containing anthrax spores that were postmarked in Trenton. Tests and interviews have confirmed a trail of contamination in a Hamilton Township distribution facility but have yielded no clear link to a culprit, FBI officials said. Other agents have returned to the U.S. apartments and haunts of the 19 hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 terrorist assaults and their suspected associates, retrieving samples to test for anthrax spores and reinterviewing witnesses. Thousands of other agents are investigating additional leads, hoax mailings and false alarms. Some White House officials and Capitol Hill lawmakers repeated yesterday that there may be a link between the anthrax scare and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network, which is blamed for the attacks on New York and Washington. "There is a suspicion that this is connected to international terrorists," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters, adding that a link with the Sept. 11 attacks has been "the operating suspicion of the White House for a considerable period of time." House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said after meeting with President Bush yesterday that there was consensus in suspecting a link between the Sept. 11 attacks and anthrax. "I don't think there's a way to prove that, but I think we all suspect that," Gephardt said. Gephardt also described the anthrax bacteria used in a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D- S.D.) as "weapons grade," saying the small size of the particles was evidence it had been "milled." "This is highly sophisticated material," he said. "It is small in size, and it aerosolizes." But investigators have found no connection between the Sept. 11 plot and the anthrax mailings, numerous officials said yesterday. Although they continue to operate under the assumption that there might be a link, investigators from the FBI, the U.S. Postal Service and other agencies say privately that the mailings do not have the earmarks of an al Qaeda terrorist operation and seem more likely to have come from a domestic source. "We are not able to rule out an association with the terrorist acts of September the 11th, but neither are we able to draw a conclusive link at this time," Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said yesterday. Dan Mihalko, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, said investigators are not close to figuring out who is behind the mailings. "I can't say we have narrowed the focus," he said. "This has the potential to be a long investigation." In recent days, Bush administration officials also appear to be softening their public contentions that Iraq, which is known to have experimented with biological weapons, might be involved in the U.S. anthrax attacks. The Justice Department, the FBI and the Postal Service have cloaked the anthrax probe, coordinated out of the FBI's Washington field office, in the same level of secrecy that has characterized the investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks, possibly obscuring key evidence from public view. And investigators say a break in the case could come at any time. Still, the lack of solid clues, and the difficulty of an investigation that relies largely on forensics, have led to widespread frustration among authorities, as the number of anthrax infections and deaths increases. Three people have died in Washington and Florida of inhalation anthrax -- the most lethal form of the disease -- and authorities revealed yesterday that they suspect a worker in the mail distribution center near Trenton has the same disease. Twelve people have been infected with either pulmonary or cutaneous forms of anthrax. The most promising clues have been found in Trenton. At least three letters contaminated with anthrax spores passed through a postal sorting facility in Hamilton Township, and a mail carrier from West Trenton contracted skin anthrax -- raising the possibility that one or more of the letters were mailed along her postal route. FBI agents and postal inspectors have blanketed that route in a search for clues. But the carrier, Teresa Heller, is unsure whether she contracted anthrax from a particular letter or from mail bins in her West Trenton post office that routinely go back and forth to the Hamilton sorting facility, according to three people who have been in contact with her recently. Although investigators are considering the possibility that someone along Heller's postal route mailed a letter laced with anthrax bacteria, she has suggested to colleagues and others that someone could have put a letter in one of her patrons' personal mailboxes. In addition, people sometimes stop their cars and hand her letters when they see her driving her mail route, one of her associates said. Another said a contaminated letter could have brushed up against one of her letters at the Hamilton Township facility. Investigators have also conducted anthrax tests on a Jersey City apartment where two men in custody in connection with the terror probe once lived. Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath were detained Sept. 12 after being pulled off an Amtrak train in Texas. They had a large sum of cash, hair dye and box-cutter knives like those believed to have been used in the Sept. 11 attacks. Reporters from the Wall Street Journal recently discovered magazines containing stories about bioterrorism in the men's apartment and alerted the FBI. Their former roommate, Mohammad Aslam Pervez, was indicted last week on charges he lied to the FBI about financial transactions. He is being held without bond. Some hijackers frequented parts of New Jersey, which was also home to a terrorist cell connected to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. A dozen of the hijackers also lived at one time or another in South Florida, where Stevens worked at the Sun tabloid in the Boca Raton offices of American Media Inc. Several hijackers or suspected associates, including suspected ringleader Mohamed Atta, are known to have inquired about crop-duster airplanes and their ability to carry large quantities of poison. Atta tried to buy one of the planes in Florida, and one man who investigators believe may have been a thwarted hijacker was found to have information on crop-dusting and wind currents on his computer after his August arrest in Minnesota. Yet investigators have found "nothing that ties them in, so far," Judy Orihuela, spokeswoman for the FBI office in Miami, said yesterday. The Justice Department yesterday released copies of the three letters containing anthrax spores that reached the offices of Daschle, NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw and the New York Post. All three end with the same sentence: "Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great." Many experts believe the phrases are intended to wrongly cast suspicion on foreign terrorists. Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism official, said the block-like handwriting appears to belong to someone whose native language is English, rather than someone who learned to write from right to left, as in Arabic. Daniel Benjamin, a former terrorism specialist at the National Security Council, said that although the anthrax attacks do not fit the al Qaeda pattern, bin Laden's network has "shown a remarkable ability to innovate tactics and to come up with a different means of attack virtually every time around." "You absolutely cannot rule them out," said Benjamin, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "At the same time, their overriding interest is mass carnage, so there is some reason for skepticism. They have not traditionally sought to scare a lot of people. Usually, they want to kill a lot of people." No American hate groups have demonstrated an ability to acquire and refine anthrax, said Mark Potok, who tracks U.S. extremist organizations for the Southern Poverty Law Center. He suspects the anthrax plot has a foreign origin. "People on the radical right have been talking about biological and chemical weapons going back to the early to mid-1990s, but there really is not much to suggest that it's gone beyond talk," Potok said. Staff writers Dale Russakoff in Trenton and Susan Schmidt in Washington contributed to this report.

Atlanta Journal and Constitution October 23, 2001 CDC: Germ Hunters' Atlanta Home Base Is Leader In Global Anthrax Fight By Charles Seabrook, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer The carefully sealed parcels arrive daily in a steady flow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's sprawling complex on Clifton Road near Emory University. In the packages are coded containers holding dust, soil, powder, paper -- the so-called "samples" gathered from post offices, network television studios, the nation's Capitol and other places suspected of harboring anthrax germs. Some containers also hold cotton swabs used in people's noses. In the CDC's laboratories, dozens of microbiologists and technicians are working seven days a week, 24 hours a day checking the bits of material for spores of the deadly bacteria. The results are immediately relayed to the field, helping public health workers pinpoint where the germs still might lurk. The CDC, the nation's premier disease-fighting agency, is no stranger to epidemics, but anthrax is testing the 55- year-old agency as it has never been tested before -- tracing the cause and controlling the spread of a disease deliberately introduced. As early as 1998, the CDC was putting into place strategies to deal with bioterrorism, but the anthrax outbreak is a trial by fire, albeit a limited one, on responding to the intentional release of a deadly germ. Public health experts give the CDC high praise for its sweeping investigation of the outbreak. But the agency also has come under criticism for what was perceived as an early lapse in communication with the public about the rapidly escalating crisis. Tara O'Toole of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Bioterrorism said providing information is essential. "Every bioterrorism exercise, every policy analysis that's been done, emphasizes the importance of continuously supplying reliable information to the public," O'Toole said. The lack of information, some health experts said, might have contributed to conflicting and occasionally inaccurate reports given to the public by politicians and the news media. "You won't ever prevent hysteria," said Dr. Philip Brachman, a professor at Emory's Rollins School of Public Health and a former CDC official. "But I feel very definitely you feed hysteria by not releasing information." CDC officials explain that information was restricted because the FBI, which is conducting a concurrent criminal investigation, muzzled them. Also, some of the laboratory tests take a day or two to show results, and the agency did not want to release findings until they were fully evaluated. Perhaps to respond to such criticisms, the CDC last week embarked on an information campaign that included reassuring public appearances by top officials and warnings that the medical community should also be aware of other diseases such as Ebola and smallpox. The CDC also conducted a special closed circuit broadcast, "Anthrax: What Every Clinician Should Know," that was seen by more than 100,000 health professionals. Nearly everyone agrees, though, that the anthrax crisis has presented the CDC a challenge never presented before, not even with the big killers such as AIDS and influenza. Although AIDS and other diseases have been much more deadly, health care workers can come to grips with them because they are spread by nature, said the CDC's director, Dr. Jeffrey Koplan. There is no evil intent. "In fighting those diseases, we know we are fighting for the good of mankind versus the downside of nature," he said. "But what makes it difficult for us with the anthrax situation is that we're having to fight the evil side of mankind. It's depressing." Nevertheless, the CDC is battling anthrax with the same fervor and resourcefulness that, over the years, have earned it the title of the world's premier disease-fighting organization. Pace is feverish In the CDC's anthrax operations center, hastily set up two weeks ago in a converted conference room, the pace is as feverish as that in the laboratories. More than 40 other CDC workers in the "ops center" pore over data on computers, use fax machines or huddle in teleconferences -- supporting doctors and other disease fighters dispatched to four states to battle anthrax. The workers field as many as 1,000 calls per day from the general public, private practice doctors and others seeking information on anthrax. Koplan has had to siphon personnel from other agency programs to handle the load. "Some of those programs have had to be put on hold," said Koplan, who preferred not to say which activities have been affected. But some cannot be put on hold, anthrax or no anthrax. The agency, for instance, also has to help control an epidemic of dengue fever in East Maui in Hawaii. In addition, the effort to cope with the influenza season, one of the CDC's busiest times of the year, is cranking up. The CDC's original mission was to control infectious diseases. The agency helped identify AIDS in 1981 and has led the nation's battle against the malady ever since. It orchestrated the global eradication of smallpox and helped make polio, diphtheria, tetanus and other once-common killers little more than a memory in the United States. Disease strategies In the past two decades, the CDC also has aimed its disease-fighting strategies at some of the most insidious national ills -- cancer and heart disease and birth defects, as well as social problems such as suicide, homicide and traffic accidents. In large part, the CDC's world renown is due to its elite corps of medical detectives, members of the agency's 50- year-old Epidemic Intelligence Service. It is the EIS that has been on the front line of the anthrax battle. Three dozen CDC disease fighters were dispatched to Florida, New York, New Jersey and Washington during the past two weeks to help local health officials determine the magnitude of the anthrax outbreaks, track down their sources and contain them. The battle began on Oct. 3, when Florida health officials notified the CDC of a possible anthrax case in Lantana. The CDC quickly sent a courier to Florida to pick up tissue specimens removed from the patient, 63-year old Bob Stevens, a photo editor at the supermarket tabloid the Sun, published in Boca Raton. The CDC's labs in Atlanta helped confirm the diagnosis. Two days later, Stevens died, the first fatal case of inhaled anthrax in America since 1978. But even before the final diagnosis was in, the CDC had chartered a jet to fly a dozen of its epidemiologists and other scientists to the West Palm Beach area to assist state health officials. The investigators employed the same tools that have served them so well in the past -- Sherlock Holmes-style sleuthing and the skills of microbiologists in the laboratory, who use the latest genetic and other laboratory tests. Some of the disease detectives interviewed Stevens' family and his doctors about the development of his symptoms, while others fanned across Florida seeking further clues. Some went to North Carolina, where Stevens had visited shortly before he became ill. They asked his wife, Maureen, where he had visited, stopped, eaten and slept during the past few weeks. Was he exposed to a sick animal, particularly a goat, whose hair has been known to harbor anthrax spores? Had he visited an old woolen mill or one that had been renovated for other purposes? Some workers in the late 1950s and early 1960s developed anthrax after being exposed to goat hair and wool at three mills in North Carolina and one in South Carolina. Stevens himself was unable to communicate. He went into a coma shortly after he arrived at the JFK Memorial Medical Center in Atlantis, Fla. Investigators fan out The investigators then went to area hospitals, interviewing doctors and infection-control workers, asking them if anyone with similar symptoms had been admitted to the hospital in recent weeks. They reviewed medical, microbiology and X-ray records of patients treated for meningitis, severe respiratory failure, unexplained fevers -- all signs of inhaled anthrax. Meanwhile, other disease fighters went to Stevens' home and took dozens of samples of soil, dust and other material and sent them off to the CDC's labs and to state labs in Florida for testing. Then, on Oct. 7, officials learned that one of Stevens' co-workers, Ernesto Blanco, 73, had tested positive for anthrax spores in his nose. The finding raised the specter of bioterrorism. Epidemiologists then put to Blanco, a mailroom clerk, the same battery of questions they had asked Stevens' family. They asked if Blanco and Stevens did anything together, such as gardening. They then turned their attention to the building. They swabbed dust in cracks, under the desks and from ventilation ducts and filters. Laboratory tests revealed spores on Stevens' office computer keyboard. The findings prompted Florida health officials to shut down the building. Everyone who had been in the building since Aug. 1 was asked to come into a Palm Beach County health clinic for nasal swabs and blood tests to help investigators determine where anthrax spores might have spread. About 1,000 people were tested, and each received a 15-day supply of the antibiotic Cipro to prevent anthrax. The CDC shipped the Cipro to West Palm Beach from a stash it keeps for national emergencies. Heightened urgency Similar investigations with perhaps heightened urgency got under way by the CDC and other health officials in New York, New Jersey and Washington. CDC's response to anthrax has caused some public health leaders to breathe a little easier. Many had warned that the country was ill-prepared to detect anthrax and other diseases that only a few American doctors have ever seen. However, Koplan said that the quick detection of anthrax in Florida and subsequently in other states suggests that doctors may be better prepared to deal with the threat than previously believed. Still, some say that the CDC has not been put to a true test. The anthrax outbreaks are very limited -- not a national epidemic, they say. A broader crisis could stretch the agency dangerously thin, they add. The CDC reminded doctors last week to be on guard against biological weapons of even greater virulence than anthrax -- smallpox, botulism, the plague, tularemia, hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola and Lassa. Any of these diseases would require a far higher deployment of personnel and resources. That's why U.S. Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.) and Senate Majority Whip Harry Reid (D-Nev.) were at the CDC last week pledging to secure hundreds of millions of dollars more through Congress to upgrade laboratories, security and communication systems and other facilities. "We have first-class people to do the job, but we don't have first-class facilities to help them do their job," Cleland said. "We absolutely need a strong CDC."

New York Times October 23, 2001 On Many Fronts, Experts Plan For The Unthinkable: Biowarfare By The New York Times Protection against biological and chemical attack was never very high on lists of national priorities until the days after Sept. 11, when it collectively occurred to Americans how vulnerable they were. An envelope that might (or might not) be filled with ominous powder, the possibility that someone might slip across a border with a jar of viruses, the impossibility of guarding every subway entrance and roof ventilator against a terrorist with a spray can: "In these times," said Dr. Frank Bia, an expert on infectious diseases and microbiology at Yale, "the unthinkable has become thinkable." Here are assessments of the nation's ability to defend itself against germ warfare from a variety of perspectives, covering what has been done, what is being done, where gaps remain, what might be done to fill them — and how quickly. Detection Knowing the Enemy The current warning system for a bio warfare attack consists of Americans themselves — people who might show up at the doctor's office with a skin lesion or flulike sniffles and fever. By then, it may be too late in two ways. The deadly infection or toxin may have already spread through the body. And, it is too late to protect others; the exposure would have happened hours to days earlier. The ideal would be something like a smoke detector, continually sampling air and sounding an alarm when something dangerous is found. But biological agents are far more difficult to identify than chemical ones like nerve gas. "There are only a few kinds of chemicals," said Calvin Chue, a scientist at the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins. "With the biologicals, it's a different and complex story." Even seemingly clean air contains billions of germs, and deadly bacteria often have harmless relatives. A detector would test thousands, if not millions, of samples. Not only would it need to avoid false alarms but also report the cases where a pathogen was indeed floating in the air. "Some organizations we've talked to said, `We'd rather not have your system here even if it had a 1 in 10,000 chance of a false alarm,' " said Dr. Richard Wheeler, an adviser to the Energy Department's Chemical and Biological National Security Program. The military has spent hundreds of millions trying to develop such detectors, with some success. But they remain expensive, bulky and not 100 percent accurate. Similar technology for civilian settings is even further off. A Washington subway station has been outfitted with a prototype detection system designed to sound an alarm, identify a pathogen and tell response teams where the pathogens are. But the system can detect only chemical toxins, not biological weapons like anthrax and smallpox. The eventual goal is to add those capabilities. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have begun testing a system that is about the size of a lectern and collects air samples and runs them through a chemical analysis that would hook antibodies onto the pathogens and cause them to glow. That work is still at least a year from fruition. Kenneth Chang and Andrew Pollack Response Training and Talking The response to confirmed anthrax cases in Florida, New Jersey, New York and Washington, is being viewed as a painful drill that has exposed gaping deficiencies in the country's ability to cope with bioterrorism. Experts on infectious diseases cited a number of areas that needed to be improved, including these: • Training for doctors, nurses, police, firefighters and others in how to respond to bioterrorism emergencies. • Expanding laboratory capacities to meet the surge in demand when thousands of specimens are sent for tests. • Communicating crucial information to doctors better and faster so they can quickly treat infected patients and assure people who are worried but well. • Finding ways for hospitals, which have cut costs by greatly reducing their number of beds, to open beds in an emergency. "Our imaginations have not been broad enough," said Dr. Frank Bia, an expert in infectious diseases and microbiology at Yale. "When someone comes to the emergency room with something unusual, doctors must trust their instincts and sixth sense to make the pieces fit together." Solving puzzling cases requires knowledge about exotic infections. But because anthrax and similar infections have occurred so rarely in this country, most doctors and nurses have, at best, only textbook knowledge about them. Dr. Bia said the health system should tap the expertise of the many foreign doctors practicing in the United States who have treated anthrax in their native countries. "They are a resource right now," he said. Health officials acknowledge that a major weakness in the response to anthrax has been the lack of effective communication. Doctors often learn about new medical advances and refresh their memories about rare conditions in the conferences called grand rounds. But few hospitals have sponsored grand rounds on bioterrorism. Dr. Stephen Baum, president of the Infectious Disease Society of New York, said he planned to hold such conferences at Beth Israel Hospital in New York City, where he is chief of medicine. Last Thursday, an estimated 50,000 doctors, nurses and health workers viewed a teleconference on anthrax sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those who saw the program applauded its quality. But others did not have the required computer connections. The capacity of laboratories needs to be expanded to deal with bioterrorism, said Dr. Baum, a member of the committee. He said there must be "a unified way" for firefighters, police officers and emergency medical workers to respond to ill patients and potentially infectious material. Then there is the nitty gritty. At least twice in the anthrax outbreak, generators have failed at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, delaying the laboratory work needed to determine who was infected. Lawrence K. Altman Prevention Seeking a Better Vaccine While drugs are useful in treating infections by some potential germ agents like anthrax, vaccines are prized by medical experts because they can prevent infections altogether or, in the case of anthrax, work with antibiotics to combat an infection. The present anthrax vaccine is not ideal — it requires six separate injections with an annual booster — and is in any case reserved for military use. Only one company, BioPort of Lansing, Mich., is licensed to make anthrax vaccine. But BioPort inherited an antiquated plant that has had trouble meeting Food and Drug Administration standards. Because of these problems, BioPort has been unable to make any vaccine since 1998. A new anthrax vaccine is being developed by the DynPort Vaccine Company under contract to the Department of Defense. Last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention applied for permission from the F.D.A. to use the stockpiled military vaccine for anyone allergic to antibiotics or who failed to respond to them in the event of anthrax exposure. "Not only would some people be given just the vaccine but it might be something used in combination with antibiotics," said a spokesman for the C.D.C. Military doctors who have considered the threat of deliberately spread anthrax concluded several years ago that people who may have been exposed to the spores should both take antibiotics and be vaccinated. In a 1999 article, two military medical experts at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Dr. Theodore J. Cieslak and Col. Edward M. Eitzen, recommended that everyone exposed to anthrax in a bioterrorism attack should be given the antibiotics ciprofloxacin or doxycycline and that in addition, "exposed persons should be immunized." At least three doses of vaccine should be given, they wrote, before stopping the antibiotics. But the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a group of outside experts that advises the C.D.C. on vaccine use, concluded in December that a sustained course of antibiotics was the best protection for people who might have inhaled spores, and that vaccination was not necessary. "You can do pretty darn well with antibiotics alone," said Dr. Charles M. Helms of the University of Iowa, a panel member. "Particularly if you have limited doses of vaccine to offer, there is no reason to get hung up on the issue of using both." But Dr. Helms said there was always the risk that bioterrorists "would recognize the usual antibiotic and may create an antibiotic-resistant strain." He added, "I think we should clearly have more vaccine available." Health experts also worry that large- scale use of antibiotics will hasten the rise of antibiotic-resistant diseases. Another advantage of a vaccine is that it would allow people to quit the 60-day course of antibiotics much sooner than otherwise. Nicholas Wade Treatments Antibiotics and Antitoxins Even as government and industry are working to increase production of known treatments for potential biological weapons like smallpox and anthrax, scientists are trying to develop additional weapons. For anthrax in particular, scientists say they have promising ideas. But, they say, the work is in its earliest stages and is far from producing a new drug that could be tested in humans. One idea is to find an antitoxin, a molecule that neutralizes the toxins produced by anthrax bacteria. Since it is the toxins, not the bacteria themselves, that kill, antitoxins could block the germs' effects. Dr. R. John Collier, a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues started on this path several years ago, and now have two possible compounds that might work. They are nowhere near ready to give the compound to people and, as with all new drugs, there is a good possibility that they will either be too toxic or too ineffective for human use. One antitoxin acts like a decoy, attaching itself to sites on cells where active anthrax toxin binds and then combining with normal active forms of the toxin and inactivating them. The investigators began by testing the decoy toxin in rats, which die in 90 minutes if they are injected with the lethal anthrax toxin. But when Dr. Collier and his colleagues inject the rats with a mixture of one part decoy toxin to four parts active toxin, the rats "survive with no symptoms," Dr. Collier said. The group also has a compound that blocks the last step in the assembly of the anthrax toxin — a seven-sided structure that assembles on the surface of a cell and then delivers the toxins into the cell. This antitoxin sticks to the heptagonal anthrax toxin and prevents it from delving into the cell. The researchers tested it with the same sort of rat tests, with the same results, Dr. Collier said. Another line of research involves a new type of antibiotic against anthrax bacteria. It was discovered by Dr. Lucy Shapiro, a Stanford microbiologist, and Dr. Stephen J. Benkovic, a chemist at Penn State, and their colleagues, who initially had no intention of going after anthrax. Instead, Dr. Shapiro said, they were designing a drug to inactivate a crucial enzyme used by so-called gram negative bacteria, a class that does not include anthrax. The made six new drugs, and all worked against gram negative bacteria in laboratory experiments, wiping out gram-negative bacteria that cause the diseases brucellosis and tularemia. Both bacteria are considered potential germ warfare weapons. Then, Dr. Shapiro said, the group tried their antibiotic on gram positive bacteria, which do not have the enzyme the drugs were made to attack. They expected that the bacteria would be impervious. But, she said, "to our astonishment, it hit anthrax and multidrug resistant strep and staph." She said she had no idea why the drugs worked against these microbes. Dr. Shapiro stressed that the work was just beginning. "If I were to give odds, I would say we have a 10 percent chance of getting all the way to an antibiotic," she said. "We are just now making enough to treat a rat. We are three years from availability if everything worked." Gina Kolata Leadership Messages, and Missteps It is an axiom of public health that sound science and good medical care are essential to controlling outbreaks of disease. But anthrax has demonstrated that other things are equally important: strong leadership, and a clear public relations strategy. As Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a recent interview, the anthrax scare, in which relatively few Americans have actually become sick, has been "high on terror, but low on biomedical impact." Curtailing that terror is essential. In any outbreak, public health officials need people to follow their directions on such issues as, for example, taking antibiotics, being vaccinated or remaining where they are rather than fleeing, possibly spreading deadly germs as they go. The way to obtain the public's cooperation, experts say, is simple: by delivering accurate information, even if it might be scary. "Leaders may feel that they are under a lot of pressure to deliver the message, `Don't worry,' " said Dr. Monica Schoch- Spana, a medical anthropologist at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies. "Quite frankly, we would all love to have the message, don't worry, if we felt it really was grounded in honest to goodness truth. But because we can't have that ideal state, the next best thing is honesty." In a bioterrorist attack, of course, government leaders must chart a delicate course. "The main message in bioterrorism is that the government is putting the right programs in place," said Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, a former New York City health commissioner. "But that is not a message that is very satisfying." With anthrax, there have been missteps. On the day the public learned that a Florida man had been diagnosed with inhalation anthrax, for instance, Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, suggested that the man may have contracted the disease by drinking water from a stream. The facts later proved Mr. Thompson wrong, causing some public health experts to fear that the public would lose faith in him and the federal government. Another problem has been a lack of centralized information; because local public health officials typically control their own outbreak investigations, information — and misinformation — has come from various corners of the country. Self-proclaimed experts have dominated the airwaves, confusing reporters and, hence, the public. "One of the lessons drawn from Florida is that the first thing Americans need to hear is a voice that speaks from knowledge, not hyperbole," said Amy Smithson, a bioterrorism expert at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a nonprofit research organization in Washington. "Because so many Americans have now heard conflicting things, they are confused and they are frightened. And that is understandable." Sheryl Gay Stolberg Buildings Air Pressure and Fine Filters Buildings are usually regarded as places of refuge, but under many circumstances, a germ attack indoors is likely to be far more dangerous than one outdoors. Fortunately, say experts on building design and bioterrorism, many measures are available to make buildings much less susceptible to such attacks. They largely involve ventilation and filtering systems, but also include recommendations on surveillance and emergency planning. Further protections are being intensively studied. "A terrorist would need far less to have the same effect" in a building than outdoors, said Dr. Anthony Policastro, a mechanical engineer at Argonne National Laboratory with expertise in bioterror. But indoors, he emphasized, the degree of danger can be greatly reduced. Experts distinguish between attacks that originate outside a building and migrate inside and those that start inside. When the attack begins outside the building, the experts say, among the most important measures is "positive pressure." That means adjusting the ventilation system so that the interior pressure is slightly higher than in the surroundings. "This requires only a modest-size blower at the normal air intake to the building that makes sure that any leakage of air in the building is out rather than in," said Dr. Richard Garwin, a physicist and bioterror expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. But the intake must be monitored so a terrorist does not introduce a biological or chemical agent into it directly. The intake should also be filtered with what are called high-efficiency air, or HEPA, filters, he said. Related measures are available against an interior attack, although "a release inside the building is more difficult to respond to," said Jan Walker, a spokeswoman for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon. The research agency, which is in the middle of a three-year project called the immune building program to make military buildings resistant to germ and chemical attacks, is working on technologies to sense and destroy those agents before people in the building are even aware they are present. But experts also know how to prepare buildings and respond to attacks inside them to reduce their lethality. HEPA filters are available commercially. If installing those filters is not possible, said James E. Woods, founding director of the HP-Woods Research Institute in Herndon, Va., then filters should at least meet the standards of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers. Mr. Woods said such filters remove even very small particles, like those that carry anthrax, with up to 90 percent efficiency. James Glanz Mail Calling on Germ-Busters One way to cut the risk of contamination from anthrax or other biological material arriving in a letter is to sterilize it. This would never be practical for the entire annual flow of hundreds of billions of letters in the United States, postal officials said. But it could easily be done for a company or institution with some basis for concern — say, a television network or the White House. Last week, government health officials began contacting companies that routinely sterilize everything from bandages to the tops on whipped-cream spray cans to see if the equipment could be used to kill bacteria or spores in mail flowing to vulnerable government offices. One senior health official, speaking only on the condition of anonymity, said the inquiries began at the request of White House officials. The White House itself refused to comment. "We don't discuss any specific security measures," Ann Womack, a spokeswoman, said. Experts said an iron or microwave oven would not have enough energy to kill the durable spores of anthrax, which can stay dormant for a century or more in the soil. But various devices can easily do the job, almost all of which use high-energy electrons or cobalt, cesium and other sources of radiation to penetrate material and destroy the DNA of any organisms. Experts noted that electronics or floppy discs could be ruined by the high-energy beams. Also, most of these systems have not been tested to ensure they can destroy the anthrax bacterium. They do routinely kill other bacteria and spores that are just as hardy, including those that cause botulism, said Dr. James S. Dickson, the chairman of the microbiology department at Iowa State University. Some manufacturers incorporate the systems on assembly lines making sterile products. Johnson & Johnson, for example, keeps Band-Aids germ-free this way. There are also dozens of free-standing sterilization centers, including several large ones a short drive from Manhattan in New Jersey, that can handle shipments of mail, company officials said. Last week, officials at a variety of companies that provide sterilization services or machines said they were assessing whether there might be a new, if unwanted, market. "I wish I lived in a world where this doesn't happen, but if it does, there is equipment to deal with it," said Yves Jongen, the founder and chief research officer of Ion Beam Applications, based in Belgium with American headquarters in Chicago. Andrew C. Revkin Transportation Defending the Travelers A central challenge facing emergency planners is reducing the risk of a biological attack exploiting the country's web of transportation links. Airports and subway, train or bus stations — with crowds of travelers bound for many destinations — provide ready-made dispersal systems for biological agents, terrorism experts say. Ways to prevent that from happening are keeping the air clean, devising detectors to pick up promptly any hints of a release and having the ability to shut down the system at the first sign of a problem. On planes, at least, the air is far cleaner than it used to be. Since the early 1980's all commercial aircraft have used extremely fine filters to clean recirculating air — with filter pores small enough to capture almost everything 0.3 microns or larger. Individual anthrax spores measure one to three microns across. Most illnesses caught on planes are caught from an adjacent passenger, not from floating pathogens circulating in the cabin, said Dr. Jolanda N. Janczewski, the president of Consolidated Safety Services, which advises airlines and other businesses on ways to prevent disease transmission. Strategies for cutting terrorism risks in subways are being tested. Cheryl Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, said officials planned to use some of the new technologies, including chemical sensors and computerized alert systems, in a simulated subway attack later this year. The last line of defense is to make sure that a transportation system can be quickly shut down to prevent dispersal once a release has been identified. The Sept. 11 attacks showed that the Federal Aviation Administration could rapidly stop air travel, and most subway systems, including the New York City system, can be stopped almost immediately from a central control room. Andrew C. Revkin and James Glanz

New York Times October 23, 2001 World's Largest Germ-Bank Union Acts to Keep Terrorists From Stealing Deadly Stocks By William J. Broad After years of complaints by American officials that security measures were too lax, the world's largest organization of scientific germ banks said yesterday that it was taking steps to bar terrorists from obtaining deadly microbes. The World Federation for Culture Collections, a union of 472 germ banks in 61 countries, said it was removing information about anthrax from its Internet sites and was pushing for tighter distribution rules among its members. Dr. Jean Swings, a microbiologist at the University of Ghent in Belgium who is the group's president, denied that current security was lax. But he said, "We have to restrict the availability even more." It was not immediately clear if the union could force member organizations to comply. Germ banks are scientific supply houses that provide cell cultures and microorganisms to researchers, either free, for sale or in exchange for other organisms. The union includes less than a third of the more than 1,500 germ banks worldwide. They maintain a million or so kinds of microorganisms, many deadly, and are regulated by a uneven patchwork of local and international rules. The United States began tightening its export of microbes from germ banks to foreign states more than a decade ago. In 1997, legislation approved by Congress imposed tough rules on the sale or transfer of pathogens within the country. Many laboratories or other institutions have adopted even stricter procedures after the Sept. 11 attacks. But American officials, both public and private, had little success getting hundreds of foreign germ repositories to adopt similar safeguards. The federation plans to make an announcement today that will address some of the security issues, but not the details of its new precautions. Some American establishments have even begun destroying their own stocks of microbes. Iowa State University killed off its deadly anthrax germs more than two weeks ago, deciding that they were not worth the trouble after Iowa's governor sent members of the National Guard to patrol the laboratory where they were stored. "It was a little sad," said Dr. James A. Roth, a veterinary microbiologist who presided over the destruction. "We'd had these since 1928. But we have a new age now, and if we're going to keep anthrax here, we're going to have tight security." Troubled by the new reality of biological terrorism, and uncertainty over where the attackers obtained their seed stocks of deadly anthrax germs, many universities, germ banks and professional groups around the world are re- examining and tightening security. On Sept. 27, even before the disclosure of the first anthrax attack, the American Society of Microbiology, a professional group in Washington that has 43,000 members in the United States and abroad, issued an alert calling on its members to "exercise prudent attention to biosafety and vigilance concerning unusual occurrences," a discreet reference to possible terrorist activity. A spokeswoman said the group had never issued such a warning before. But it did not recommend specific safety steps. Over the decades, the free exchange of deadly microbes has helped the world's scientists crush infectious disease, doubling the human life span in one of history's quietest revolutions. Among the killers were plague, cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis, smallpox, typhus, leprosy, polio and anthrax, a disease of grazing animals that can infect humans. Dr. Ronald M. Atlas, president- elect of the American Society of Microbiology, estimated that 250 or so scientific centers in the United States had anthrax stocks, and 1,000 or so sites abroad. Such centers include not only germ banks but also universities, veterinary research centers, medical businesses and government laboratories. Anthrax is "extraordinarily widely distributed, which unfortunately says a terrorist can probably get the pathogen," Dr. Atlas said. While such collections must now reassess their vulnerability to theft and abuse, Dr. Atlas said, their germ work is quite legitimate and often crucial for fighting disease and confronting danger. For instance, he said, a new focus of research is whether X-ray machines that scan bags can be easily adapted to kill anthrax spores. "Maybe I'd like to call the Iowa lab and ask them to try it," Dr. Atlas, who is also dean of the graduate school at the University of Louisville, said in an interview. "And they'll tell me, `We've just destroyed the culture and can't do that anymore.' That's the legitimate research side that suffers." Joe Shannahan, a spokesman for Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa, said armed guards were still protecting anthrax supplies at a federal Department of Agriculture laboratory in Ames and at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Experts said few centers had destroyed their microbe stocks, but Dr. Roth of Iowa State said the new dangers of keeping anthrax outweighed any possible scientific use. Before the multiple strains were destroyed, he said, Iowa researchers checked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the F.B.I. to see if the anthrax germs were needed. "They didn't want them," he said. Dr. Roth said the anthrax germs had been under no special protections, other than a locked door, and that he himself had been only dimly aware of their existence. He said he had no indication that any unauthorized person had visited the lab seeking the germs, adding that he did not believe it was widely known that they were stored there. The desire to tighten security has led some centers around the country to destroy pathogens routinely. Dr. Conrad Eugster, director of the Texas veterinary medical diagnostic laboratory at Texas A&M University, said that in the last year or so he and his colleagues had stopped storing anthrax germs from outbreaks they had diagnosed. "We destroy them in a day," Dr. Eugster said, so that no strains can fall into the wrong hands. For America, the tightening began after Washington in the late 1980's and early 1990's realized that germ banks used by American researchers had inadvertently shipped deadly microbes to the military forces of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi president, and to people who turned out to be domestic terrorists. The turning point came in 1995 when Larry Wayne Harris, an Army veteran in Ohio with a history of affiliations with hate groups, managed to buy plague bacteria from an American germ bank by mail, paying $100 each for three vials. After he was caught, Congress rewrote the nation's terrorism laws and tightened germ security, imposing tough rules on their acquisition and transfer. The rules took effect in 1997. American officials, however, had little success getting hundreds of foreign germ repositories to adopt similar safeguards. The world's largest germ bank, the American Type Culture Collection, in Manassas, Va., lobbied the World Federation to back similar rules, going so far as to write a proposed resolution. "They ignored it," Dr. Raymond H. Cypess, president of the germ bank, said in a 1998 interview. "The international community has failed to address this issue in a meaningful way."

Miami Herald October 22, 2001 Military Set To Begin Major Bio-Cleanup Of Boca Raton Tabloid Offices By Daniel de Vise and Beth Reinhard Military personnel traveled to Boca Raton on Monday to bolster an unprecedented biological cleanup inside the shuttered offices of supermarket tabloid publisher American Media Inc. Other than the removal of small traces of anthrax from post offices that process AMI mail, the cleansing of the 66,000 square-foot building is the first ``bio-cleanup'' led by the Environmental Protection Agency, which generally grapples with chemical and oil spills. The federal government has set aside $500,000 from the agency's Superfund program to decontaminate AMI headquarters, where two employees are believed to have contracted the deadly inhaled form of anthrax from a letter. State health officials said Monday they expect more AMI employees to show exposure to anthrax, as they await test results on about 300 people. ``Before the event is over, we'll probably have additional numbers of people we believe were exposed,'' said Steve Wiersma, the state's chief epidemiologist. ``The numbers will grow as we go into the final phase of the investigation.'' The positive tests do not mean the employees will get the disease, Wiersma said, noting all 300 are on antibiotics. EPA officials arrived in Boca Raton over the weekend after getting the go-ahead from the FBI, which has been examining the site. They took 20 samples from the ventilation system on the first floor of the three-story building. Federal agents had found anthrax spores in the mailroom on that floor. ``If there's nothing in the vents, there's a good chance it didn't go anywhere else in the building unless people carried it on them,'' Fred Stroud, the EPA's on-scene coordinator, said Monday. Sampling will continue as a 50-person crew works toward a room-by-room blueprint of where the contamination has spread. Workers will use swabs and sterile gauze to pick up any spores and send them to a lab for identification. The work likely will take at least a month at an undetermined cost. EPA agents are joined by members of the U.S. Coast Guard Strike Team based in Mobile, Ala., and National Guard civil support team members based in Florida. Two large Coast Guard trucks arrived at the AMI building Monday afternoon to serve as a command post. The trucks will also provide ``washing stations'' to decontaminate workers after they leave the building, said Petty Officer Judy Silverstein. Officials at AMI, publisher of tabloids The National Enquirer, The Globe, The Sun and several others, said they expect a report by Friday on the extent of contamination. ``Right now they're testing to see if the whole building is contaminated or if it's only the mailroom and Bob Stevens' desk,'' said David Pecker, CEO of American Media. Stevens, a Sun photo editor, died of pulmonary anthrax. Although AMI said earlier it would not return to the building, Pecker said he has seen a groundswell of support for reclaiming the abandoned building if it is safe to inhabit. A decision on reinhabiting would also involve the Palm Beach Health Department. The EPA hasn't yet chosen among several powerful cleaning agents to decontaminate the building and its contents. Among the options: bleach applied with a sponge; anti-bacterial foam, developed at a government laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M.; and vaporized hydrogen peroxide, which could sterilize items left behind when the building was closed. AMI officials are hoping to reclaim the pop-culture heritage inside, including a photo of Elvis Presley in his coffin, an image that sold six million newspapers. Herald staff writer Lesley Clark contributed to this report.