Scientific Researach Institute of Vaccines Sverdlovsk-19 - Anthrax Outbreak
After the Great Patriotic War, a new research institute was formed with the stated purpose to conduct research on military hygiene. The MOD took over the former Cherkassy-Sverdlovsk Infantry School in Sverdlovsk (now called Yekaterinburg) and rebuilt it, so in actuality it housed development laboratories and biological production equipment. The first group of scientists and technicians to staff the new plant began work in 1949. In 1960, this branch was separated from the Kirov Institute and renamed the Military Technical Scientific Research Institute (Sverdlovsk Institute). The institute was located within Military Compound 19 and its major function was to mass-produce pathogens used to arm biologicalweapons.
Following its ratification of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention in 1972, the Soviet Union established Biopreparat as a civilian pharmaceutical and biotechnology enterprise, which also served as the civilian focal point of the Soviet biological weapons program. Capitalizing on post-1972 advances in biotechnology such as genetic engineering, the Soviet Union program researched and produced a range of weapons employing smallpox, anthrax, plague, and other dangerous pathogens.
Anthrax is an infectious disease from Bacillus anthracis rod-shaped bacteria that is naturally found in soil commonly affecting domestic and wild grazing animals (cattle, sheep, goats, deer, and other grazing animals). Anthrax is NOT contagious, however rare cases of person-to-person transmission has been reported with weeping cutaneous anthrax lesions. Products (I.E. meat or hides) of infected animals serve as a reservoir for human disease. Humans are infected when anthrax spores enter the body via breath, eating contaminated food/water or spores enter a cut/scrape in skin and via injection.
Anthrax is endemic to all regions of Russia, and natural outbreaks of the disease remain common today. In the past, czarist Russia and the former Soviet Union had among the world’s highest levels of recorded anthrax outbreaks.
The military has long been concerned about B anthracis as a potential biological weapon because anthrax spores are infectious by the aerosol route, and a high mortality rate is associated with untreated inhalational anthrax. Anthrax spores make a potent biological weapon because the spores are hardy and the optimal size to enter and lodge in the lungs if inhaled. Inhalation anthrax is nearly 100% fatal.
In 1979 the largest inhalational anthrax epidemic of the 20th century occurred in Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinenberg), Russia. On 2 April 1979, spores were accidentally release from a military research facility located upwind from where the cases occurred. On April 4, residents of Chkalovsky district began to apply in large numbers to the hospital No. 24 of Sverdlovsk. All came with the same symptoms, their condition worsened sharply. There was no hospital in the medical institution, so the hospital with a therapeutic building for 100 patients was not ready for a sharp influx. The applicants were placed on wheelchairs and couches in the corridors. Soon, people had to be sent to a nearby hospital. On April 10, at the hospital ?40, doctors performed the first autopsy of the dead from the disease. They diagnosed anthrax. This conclusion was confirmed by pathologist Faina Abramova in the regional sanitary and epidemiological station Published reports on the epidemic’s vital statistics and case fatality rates have varied. Some reports suggest that there may have been as many as 250 cases, with 100 deaths, while others claim that 358 people became ill with forty-five deaths. Despite the inconsistencies, the most widely accepted reports provided by two Soviet physicians, 96 human anthrax cases were reported, of which 79 were gastrointestinal and 17 cutaneous. The 79 gastrointestinal cases resulted in 64 deaths.
Authorities in Sverdlovsk first thought diseased cattle in the area had caused the deaths. To reduce the passions in the city press, recommendations were issued to residents to beware of anthrax infection from the meat of sick animals. The following was published in the newspaper Uralsky Rabochiy: “In Sverdlovsk and the region, cases of cattle disease have become more frequent. Low-quality feed for cows was introduced to the collective farm. The city administration urges all Sverdlovsk residents to refrain from purchasing meat "in random places" - including in the markets. " The same message was broadcast on television every two hours. On the walls of the houses there were posters with a picture of a cow and the inscription "anthrax."
After the outbreak, the Soviet government released official reports stating that the anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk had been the result of tainted meat being sold in the regions surrounding the city. The Soviet government’s tainted meat theory as the pathogenesis of the anthrax epidemic was not too far fetched. A March 1980 Tass article entitled, “A Germ of Lying,” advanced the natural outbreak of anthrax explanation, and condemned the U.S. accusations of the release of a BW agent as part of a plan for spurring the arms race, intensifying tensions, and waging psychological warfare against the USSR.
In the 1979 Sverdlovsk disaster, there were cases with the onset of symptoms occurring up to 6 weeks after exposure. Such long incubation times, while unusual, reflect the ability of a very smallamount of anthrax spore being able to remain in the lungs formany days before there is sufficient growth to produce symptoms. Initial symptoms may include sore throat, mild fever,myalgia, coughing, and chest discomfort lasting up to a few days. Secondary symptoms develop abruptly with a sudden onset of fever, acute respiratory distress due to pulmonary edema and pleural effusions, followed by cyanosis, shock, and coma. Meningitis is common. The fatality rate for inhalation anthrax is estimated to be approximately 45% to 90%.
Before the 1979 anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk, very few doctors had the training or ability to diagnose a case of pulmonary anthrax. Although the initial report of this event attributed the infections to a gastrointestinal source, later evidence indicated that an aerosol release of weaponized anthrax spores from a military production facility had occurred, and thus, inhalational anthrax was the predominant cause of these civilian casualties.
The amount of anthrax released in the outbreak was said by some to be a small amount (less than 1 gram). Other estimates of the spores released outside the facility was seventy kilograms (150 pounds), an amount that could infect the occupants of a region spanning tens of thousands of square miles. Reports collected from American scientists after visiting Sverdlovsk in 1991 placed " ... nearly all of the victims within a narrow plume that stretches southeast from Compound 19 to the neighborhood past the ceramics factory…What we know proves a lethal plume of anthrax came from Compound 19" [Guillemin, Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak]. As it turned out, the wind carried the anthrax away from the city. If the wind had been in the opposite direction that day — toward the city of Sverdlovsk — the death rate could have been in the hundreds of thousands and many facilities would have been contaminated.
The technological process involved the drying of bacterial broth to a powdery state required special security measures. The filters at the factory were responsible for cleaning the air from the working area of ??workshops occupied by the production of anthrax culture in a dry form. Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Cheryshev, shift manager at the plant, 30 March, March 1979 was not aware of the absence of a filter. As a result, the workers of the evening shift (the production was organized in three shifts), without finding a record in the workbook, quietly started the equipment. For more than three hours, the plant threw portions of dried anthrax culture into the air of the night sky of Sverdlovsk. When the absence of bioprotection was detected, the production was urgently stopped, a filter was installed and the work was quietly continued.
Shortly after the accident, the production plant was closed and its production function was moved to Stepnogorsk in Kazakhstan. After the accident in Sverdlovsk and the noisy international scandal, the leadership of the Soviet military-industrial complex faced the question: what to do with the plant? It was already impossible to continue working with anthrax there, even despite the fact that Sverdlovsk remained a city closed to foreigners. In 1981, in accordance with Brezhnev’s secret order, the Sverdlovsk Gorodok 19 was actually completely relocated to Stepnogorsk, in the northern region of Kazakhstan. Major Alibekov was appointed director of the Stepnogorsk Research and Production Base (as it was officially called). This mobilization facility was designed to produce three hundred tons of biological weapons annually - primarily combat strains of anthrax. But here weapons were also developed based on plague, glanders, tularemia and Marburg fever.
The US Defense Intelligence Agency's publication "Soviet Military Power" reported "Since the summer of 1979, information has been obtained from a variety of sources that presents strong circumstantial evidence of an inadvertent release of anthrax bacteria from a highly secured military installation in Sverdlovsk, in the USSR. The available information and our technical analysis point strongly to biological R&D activities that exceed those one would normally expect for biological warfare protection purposes. Furthermore, we cannot discount the probability that the Soviets have continued to pursue other microbiological agents for possible development and standardization as weapons of biological warfare."
In 1979, B. N. Yeltsin was the first secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional party committee. In 1992, President Boris Yeltsin acknowledged the existence of the Soviet Union’s offensive biological weapons program and pledged that Russia would comply with the terms of the Convention. In an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda, he said that special services were to blame for the epidemic. “The KGB nevertheless admitted that the reason was our military development. Andropov called Ustinov and ordered the liquidation of these industries completely. I thought they did. It turns out that the laboratories simply relocated to another area, and the development of these weapons continued, ” Yeltsin said.
Now “19 Object” is the Federal State Institution “48 Central Research Institute of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation - Center for Military-Technical Problems of Biological Protection of the Research Institute of Microbiology of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation”. From the title it is clear that the center deals exclusively with the problems of biological protection.
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