Anthrax:  Hart Senate Office Building Reopens

After more than three months, the Hart Senate Office Building reopened yesterday (see GSN, Jan. 22).  Meanwhile, investigators on the anthrax case focused their efforts in New Jersey, according to reports (see GSN, Jan. 15).

The Hart building yesterday reopened after an intense decontamination effort to rid it of anthrax spores discovered in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).  While most senators and their staff members were allowed to return to their offices, Daschle and his staff will still work out of temporary quarters until carpeting and furniture can be replaced (see GSN, Oct. 16, 2001).

“It’s good to be back,” Daschle said.  “It’s good to be confident that we can return to normalcy” (U.S. State Department release, Jan. 22).

Daschle’s office suite is expected to be ready for reoccupancy in mid-March, the Washington Post reported today.

“I feel completely safe,” Daschle told reporters, adding that no member of his staff quit over the anthrax letter.  “I think we’ve done everything possible to remediate this building, and I believe it has been a complete success.”

Extensive testing of the Hart building, using culture samples and thousands of test strips laced with bacteria, helped officials decide when it was safe to reopen the building.

“People should feel comfortable and confident about reentering the building,” said Patrick Meehan, director of the emergency and environmental health systems division at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  “Every room was tested” (Spencer Hsu, Washington Post, Jan. 23).

Exposed to 3,000 Times the Lethal Dose

Daschle’s staff was exposed to up to 3,000 times the lethal dose of anthrax when the tainted letter was opened in mid-October, said doctors who treated staffers.

“We are in completely uncharted waters,” said physician Greg Martin, of the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.  He said the analysis of exposure levels for Daschle’s staff was based on a prior Canadian study on exposure levels after simulated anthrax was released in a room.

On the second day after the tainted letter was opened, doctors became so concerned over the rapid growth rate of cultures taken from Daschle staff members’ nasal swabs that they reserved beds at the naval hospital to prepare for a large number of aides contracting the disease, USA Today reported today. 

Martin wanted to inoculate 70 Daschle staffers to protect them from any lingering spores in their bodies after their 90-day regimen of the antibiotic Cipro ran out, according to USA Today.  The CDC, however, waited two months before making the anthrax vaccine available for such a purpose.

Immediate knowledge of exposure and quick antibiotic treatments played a large part in preventing Daschle and his staff from contracting anthrax, according to USA Today.

“People say, ‘Well, nobody got sick,’” said Laura Petrou, Daschle’s administrative assistant.  “That’s not luck.  Nobody’s gotten sick because we worked very hard at it” (Laura Parker, USA Today, Jan. 23).

New Jersey May Hold the Key

The key to solving the “Amerithrax” investigation into who is responsible for the anthrax attacks might be discovered in central New Jersey, law enforcement officials said yesterday.

The FBI and U.S. Postal Service are expected to hold a press conference today in Trenton, N.J., to appeal for help from the public and to announce a doubling of the reward in the anthrax case to $2.5 million, officials said.  All four of the anthrax-tainted letters were postmarked from Trenton.

“This is a targeted effort toward central New Jersey,” said an FBI official.  “Investigators and others associated with the case continue to believe that whoever did this has a relationship with central Jersey, whether they lived there, worked there or just spent a lot of time there.  The key to the case could be there” (Eggen/Warrick, Washington Post, Jan. 23).

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South Korean Response:  Military Wants Anthrax Vaccine Next Year

South Korean military officials said they would purchase anthrax vaccine doses for the first time next year, the Medical Letter on the CDC & FDA reported this week (see GSN, Jan. 12).

The South Korean Defense Ministry expects to spend $1.5 million to buy enough vaccine for 10,000 troops from U.S. and Russian suppliers, said a Defense Ministry official.  He added that South Korea currently has no stockpile of anthrax vaccine for its 650,000 troops.  The Defense Ministry also said it plans to complete work on a locally produced anthrax vaccine by next year (Medical Letter on the CDC & FDA, Jan. 27).

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Czech Response:  Location of Bioweapons Protection Center Announced

Czech Defense Minister Jaroslav Tvrdik said Jan. 18 that a planned biological weapons protection center is to be built in Techotin, East Bohemia, the Czech news agency CTK reported (see GSN, Jan. 18). It is no longer necessary to keep the center’s location completely secret, Tvrdik said.  He added that more information on the center and its equipment would soon be released.

The Czech military will finance construction of the center entirely out of its own budget, Czech Finance Minister Jiri Rusnok said Monday.  He added that the Finance Ministry would not provide additional funding (RFE/RL Newsline, Jan. 22).

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Uzbekistan:  Vozrozhdeniya Island Secure, But Concerns Remain

By Kerry Boyd
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Uzbek troops are guarding buried anthrax spores from the former Soviet biological weapons program on a former island in the Aral Sea while the United States and Uzbekistan plan to decontaminate the island this year, Uzbek officials said Friday.

While security seems strong now, some experts worry that the Aral Sea’s dropping water table has made access to the former dumping grounds much easier in recent years, leading to long-term concerns over the risk of theft or even of diseased animals escaping to mainland Uzbekistan.

Uzbek troops have secured the areas with biological weapons on the Vozrozhdeniya Island, Uzbek U.S. Ambassador Shavkat Hamrakulov told a meeting at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  The island had been left unguarded after the Soviet Union’s collapse, but now the island is so strongly guarded that it is highly unlikely that terrorists could infiltrate the area and extract material, Hamrakulov said.  He added, however, that the island could be a source of deadly materials for terrorists in the future if it is not decontaminated.

The Soviet Union used Vozrozhdeniya Island as a storage and test site for biological weapons, including strains of anthrax, plague, tularemia and other diseases, perhaps including smallpox, experts believe.  Scientists designed the strains with characteristics — including a resistance to antibiotics — to make them particularly dangerous, according to Jonathan Tucker of the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Although Soviet authorities doused the anthrax spores with bleach and buried them in metal containers, the spores formed clumps that protected some viable spores inside, Tucker said.  Soviet scientists designed the anthrax to be particularly hardy and virulent, and the remaining viable spores could survive in the ground for decades, he said.

Soviet authorities originally chose to use the island because it was remotely located — separated from land by the Aral Sea.  In the 1960s, however, the Soviet Union began diverting Aral Sea water in a failed attempt to irrigate the surrounding area and produce cotton, Tucker said.  Over the last few decades, the sea has shrunk dramatically and the once small and remote island became part of a large emerging landmass that finally connected to the mainland last year, forming a peninsula.

Since the island became accessible many people have visited it to search for scrap metal, but it is improbable, Tucker said, that anyone extracted buried anthrax spores because few people know their location, which takes up an area smaller than a football field, he said.

Uzbekistan has received no information indicating that terrorists have been to the island, said Alla Karimova, an arms control expert with the Uzbek Foreign Affairs Ministry.

U.S.-Uzbek Decontamination Plans

Under the U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction program, Uzbekistan and the United States have signed agreements that include $6 million in U.S. funds to decontaminate the island and dismantle the biological weapons complex on the island (see GSN, Nov. 28, 2001).  The current funds may be insufficient to complete the entire project, but they are certainly enough to begin, Hamrakulov said.

The work will probably begin this spring, Tucker said, and the decontamination will probably be complete by the end of the year and then authorities would dismantle the larger biological weapons complex. 

No Information from the Soviet Union

When the Soviet Union collapsed and troops eventually left the island, Soviet authorities left no information or documents about the island, Karimova said.  Uzbek authorities learned about the existence of biological agents on the island from media reports, she said.

Immediately after the discovery of the biological agents, Uzbek authorities tried to find Uzbek citizens who may have worked on Vozrozhdeniya, but no Uzbek citizens were part of the Soviet biological weapons program on the island, Karimova said.

Could Animals Spread Disease?

Soviet scientists conducted biological warfare experiments on animals that could not escape when the island was surrounded by the Aral Sea, according to Tucker, who expressed concern that animals could now carry virulent diseases to the mainland.  There could be “an animal reservoir” of the plague on the island, Tucker said, because the Soviet Union may have conducted research with plague-infected rodents on the island.

Hamrakulov also expressed concern about living creatures, such as insects and small birds, spreading diseases from the island.

Uzbek Response to Health Risks and Anthrax Attacks in the United States

The Uzbek Health Ministry has worked to prevent diseases from reaching Uzbekistan by establishing facilities to prevent the spread of disease, creating an office to increase preparedness for infection and vaccinating populations deemed at high risk against anthrax, Karimova said. 

After anthrax began circulating through the mail in the United States (see related GSN story, today), Uzbekistan increased its anthrax vaccination program to include a total of 50,000 people per year, including those in administrative jobs, the postal service, the transportation sector and others in high-risk categories, Karimova said. 

With U.S. help, Uzbekistan also increased safeguards at water facilities, Karimova said.

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Anthrax:  U.S. Military Facility Lost Samples, Reports Say

The U.S. Army lost samples of anthrax and other pathogens in the early 1990s, the Baltimore Sun reported yesterday (see GSN, Dec. 18, 2001).  Meanwhile, scientists have detected genetic fingerprints in the anthrax strain used in the attacks, which might help determine its source, according to reports.

A 1992 U.S. Army inquiry found 27 sets of pathogen specimens missing from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Md., according to the Sun.  The samples included specimens of anthrax, Ebola, simian AIDS, hantavirus and two labeled “unknown.” The samples were likely rendered harmless because of the chemicals used to prepare them for microscopic study, said an army spokeswoman.

The inquiry also found that someone at the facility appeared to be entering a laboratory late at night to conduct unauthorized research on anthrax, the Sun reported.  A numerical counter on laboratory equipment appeared to be set back and the misspelled word “antrax” was left in the counter’s memory, according to army documents obtained by the Hartford Courant.

In 1992, Lt. Col. Michael Langford, then head of USAMRIID, called for an inventory after he found there was “little or no organization” and “little or no accountability” at the facility.

“It turned out that there was quite a bit of stuff that was unaccounted for, which only verifies that there needs to be some kind of accountability down there,” Langford said in a 1992 interview with investigators.

It is yet unknown whether the anthrax strain used in the mail attacks is among those reported missing from USAMRIID, the Sun reported.  Some of the lost anthrax was not from the Ames strain, said army spokeswoman Caree Vander-Linden.  She added that one complete specimen set and samples from several others sets were located.  Incomplete records on the sample sets, however, made it difficult to provide more information, Vander-Linden said.

“In January of 2002, it’s hard to say how many of those were missing in February of 1991,” Vander-Linden said (Dolan/Altimari, Baltimore Sun, Jan. 21).

Previous genetic testing found matches between the anthrax strain used in the attacks and those kept by USAMRIID and other military research facilities, the Washington Post reported today.  Investigators hope further analysis of the spores found in a letter to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) will help determine the source of the anthrax.

C.J. Peters, former deputy commander at USAMRIID, said the missing samples are not infectious.

“It was a very bad situation,” he said.  “But the important question is how many of these missing samples were infectious, and the answer is none.”

Experts also said it has been difficult to control the whereabouts of anthrax samples.

“If someone wanted to steal something, could they have done it?  The answer is yes,” Peters said.  “There’s no 100 percent guarantee short of putting the scientists under guard 24 hours a day” (Joby Warrick, Washington Post, Jan. 22).

Mark Wheelis, a microbiologist at the University of California said that “no matter what you do, there is not any way you can prevent a determined, skillful microbiologist from stealing traces of microbial culture that he is working with, because it takes so few microbes to start a culture.”

Until a few years ago, bioterrorism was not a major issue, Wheelis said.  “Nobody was thinking that one of these respected, trusted scientists might actually steal one of the cultures with malevolent intent” (Medical Letter on the CDC & FDA, Jan. 20).

A former USAMRIID scientist said the facility did produce small amounts of powdered anthrax, which contrasts with previous army statements, the Washington Post reported yesterday.

The process of creating wet anthrax to study caused small amounts of dry powder to form on the sides of laboratory equipment, said Ayaad Assaad.

“It dried to a powder as fine as any you could make,” Assaad said.  “You could collect some of it using a Kleenex or your finger.”

The recent details of the security and accountability at USAMRIID are detailed in court documents that are part of a 1998 discrimination suit filed by Assaad, according to the Post (Weiss/Warrick, Washington Post, Jan. 21).

Research Developments

Scientists at the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Md., said they have discovered genetic fingerprints in the strain used in the attacks that might help pinpoint its source.

Institute scientists said they have found a small number of differences in the genetic makeup of the strain used in the attacks and an Ames strain standard.  The differences include single unit changes in the anthrax DNA, called Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms.  They also include variable repeats, which are sites where the same small DNA sequence is repeated several times, according to the New York Times.  The variable regions are the types of differences used in human DNA fingerprinting, the Times reported.

The new points of difference between the two strains, which are expected to be confirmed in the next two weeks, could help determine the source of the anthrax used in the attack by matching it to strains collected from about a dozen U.S. and foreign facilities, according to the Times.

The new findings “might give us the edge” in finding who is responsible, said a senior law enforcement official.  He added, however, that publicity over the findings could alert the person responsible for the attacks. 

What detectives cannot do is give the responsible person a “road map” to the case, said the senior law enforcement official.

“The person who made this stuff understands science,” he said.  “We don’t want to give him any little edge, to help him do a better job of covering his tracks” (Broad/Wade, New York Times, Jan. 22).

The Anthrax Research Project, which includes members such as Intel and Microsoft, yesterday asked people to use their home computers to help create a treatment for anthrax. 

Computer users can download a screen saver for their computer that donates the computer’s spare processing resources to build a virtual supercomputer to analyze billions of molecules in less time than a laboratory, the group said in a press release.

The screen saver runs whenever computer resources are available, according to Reuters.  Once processing is finished, the information is sent back to the group online.  A new data set is delivered when the person connects to the Internet (Reuters/New York Times, Jan. 22).

Hart Building Reopens Today

The Hart Senate Office Building will reopen today, the U.S. Capitol Police said Friday (see GSN, Jan. 18). 

The discovery last week of a bag containing protective gear in the ceiling above Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s (D-S.D.) office delayed the Hart building’s reopening.  Tests on the suit and the area where it was found came back negative for anthrax, according to the Washington Post. 

“Initial information indicates it is likely that the bag was inadvertently used to seal air leaks in preparation for the fumigation of [Daschle’s] suite,” said Capitol Police spokesman Lt. Dan Nichols.  “The bag is similar to other bags which were used for that purpose.”

The Senate yesterday reopened offices in the basement of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, the Post reported.  The offices had previously been closed because they shared the ventilation system with the area where the bag was found.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated the Hart building decontamination effort cost about $20 million, said a Senate Appropriations Committee spokesman.  Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) yesterday said he was concerned over the cost and called for an inquiry into the hiring and payment of contractors.

“I grant you that this is a massive undertaking on your part,” wrote Grassley in a letter to EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman.  “And while I’m also confident that you take our safety very seriously, I am concerned about the fiscal integrity of this operation.”

Strong (and Scaly) Survivors

Two goldfish and a suckerfish belonging to Senator John Breaux (D-La.) survived the Hart building decontamination, said Breaux spokesman Brian Weiss.  The fish were left in the building after it was evacuated and closed when the Daschle letter was discovered.

“No one thought they would survive chlorine dioxide gas, only a few time-released food capsules and no change of water or filters, but they’re swimming,” Weiss said.  “They’re tough southern Louisiana fish” (Spencer Hsu, Washington Post, Jan. 19).

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