What You Always Wanted To Know About Anthrax

2001 anthrax attacks

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Investigations disclosed that the cases occurred as the result of a plume emanating from a biological research institute and led to the conclusion that the outbreak had resulted from an accidental aerosol generated in work related to biological warfare studies. The following book provides more details of the Sverdlovsk accident. B iohazard tells more than you ever wanted to know about the Soviet Union's bioweapons programme, and is written by the person pre-eminently qualified to do so: Colonel Kanatjan Alibekov, First Deputy Chief and technical head of that program from to , when, fortunately for all of us, he turned down an invitation to head a bioweapons program in his native Kazakhstan and defected to the USA.

There he changed his name to Ken Alibek and turned his research interests around; he is currently working on broad-spectrum immunity against microbial pathogens He says that Russia's stockpiles of plague, tularemia, and smallpox have been destroyed, but says nothing about their anthrax stocks.

The first three have use-by dates and need to be stored in the cold and periodically restocked. When scientists realized what was happening, they halted their trial and gave the vaccine to every worker at Arms Mill. No one else got sick. In fact, that experimental vaccine became the basis for the one given today to soldiers.

The Arms Textile Mill continued operating until , when the company went out of business. In , after much planning, the brick building was taken down. Men in white suits sprayed the inside with potent mixtures of chlorine and formaldehyde, and an incinerator was brought on site to burn wood and other materials. The bricks would be buried off-site. And that was that for the Arms. They were eventually traced to a government scientist, but not before ramping up panic in a country already consumed by it.

Construction was underway on a new baseball stadium. It was being built on the site where the bricks from the Arms Textile Mill were buried. Utility workers did actually hit those bricks while sinking some electric poles, which prompted more tests and a few scary headlines. But in the end, no one got sick. But probably as close to zero as you can get. Her family eventually came to understand that the spores had been hiding inside of goat hair where Jette worked.

That they were released into the air, and then took away her dad. View the discussion thread. New Hampshire has 50 new Americans calling it home as of today. They were sworn in as new citizens at a ceremony in Manchester Wednesday, representing 27 nations. This is the fifth year for this annual naturalization ceremony. It's not old, but it's certainly grand: That therapist stated in an application for a restraining order that Ivins had a "history dating to his graduate days of homicidal threats, actions, plans, threats and actions towards therapist.

David Irwin, his psychiatrist called him homicidal, sociopathic with clear intentions. According to the report on the Amerithrax investigation published by the Department of Justice, Ivins engaged in actions and made statements that indicated a consciousness of guilt. He took environmental samples in his laboratory without authorization and decontaminated areas in which he had worked without reporting his activities.

He also threw away a book about secret codes, which described methods similar to those used in the anthrax letters. Ivins threatened other scientists, made equivocal statements about his possible involvement in a conversation with an acquaintance, and put together outlandish theories in an effort to shift the blame for the anthrax mailings to people close to him. The FBI said that Ivins's justifications for his actions after the environmental sampling, as well as his explanations for a subsequent sampling, contradicted his explanation for the motives for the sampling.

According to the Department of Justice, flask RMR, which was created and controlled by Ivins, was used to create "the murder weapon". In , researchers did not believe it was possible to distinguish between anthrax variants. Despite researchers advising the FBI that this may not have been possible, Ivins tutored agents on how to recognise them.

Considered cutting edge at the time, this technique is now commonplace. He submitted two test tube "slants" each from four samples of the Ames strain in his collection. Two of the slants were from flask RMR Although the slants from flask RMR were later reported to be a positive match, all eight slants were reportedly in the wrong type of test tube and would therefore not be usable as evidence in court. The subpoena also included instructions on the proper way to prepare slants. The two new slants prepared from flask RMR submitted in April by Ivins did not contain the mutations that were later determined to be in flask RMR It was reported that in April , Henry Heine found a test tube in the lab containing anthrax and contacted Ivins.

Ivins obstructed the investigation either by providing a submission which was not in compliance with the subpoena, or worse, that he deliberately submitted a false sample. Three of the four sets tested positive for the morphs.

Ivins was particularly upset. He revealed to the counselor and psychologist leading the group, and other members of the group, that he was a suspect in the anthrax investigation and that he was angry at the investigators, the government, and the system in general.

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He said he was not going to face the death penalty, but instead had a plan to 'take out' co-workers and other individuals who had wronged him. He noted that it was possible, with a plan, to commit murder and not make a mess. He stated that he had a bullet-proof vest, and a list of co-workers who had wronged him, and said that he was going to obtain a Glock firearm from his son within the next day, because federal agents were watching him and he could not obtain a weapon on his own.

He added that he was going to 'go out in a blaze of glory. While in a mental hospital, Ivins made menacing phone calls [] to his social worker Jean Duley on July 11 and In the letters sent to the media, the characters 'A' and 'T' were sometimes bolded or highlighted by tracing over, according to the FBI suggesting that the letters contained a hidden code.

Some believe the letters to the New York Post [] and Tom Brokaw [] contained a "hidden message" in such highlighted characters. Below is the media text with the highlighted As and Ts:. According to the FBI , Summary Report issued on February 19, , following the search of Ivins's home, cars, and office on November 1, , investigators began examining his trash.

Anthrax in Manchester: Revisiting the Arms Mill Outbreak of 1957

An Eternal Golden Braid , published by Douglas Hofstadter in " and "a issue of American Scientist Journal which contained an article entitled 'The Linguistics of DNA,' and discussed, among other things, codons and hidden messages". The 3-letter groups are codons, "meaning that each sequence of three nucleic acids will code for a specific amino acid". Ivins's] Former Colleague 2. In June , Ivins was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital.

The FBI stated that during a June 5 group therapy session there, Ivins had a conversation with an unnamed witness, during which he made a series of statements about the anthrax mailings that the FBI said could best be characterized as " non-denial denials ". Some of his responses allegedly included the following selected quotes:. After the FBI announced that Ivins acted alone, many people with a broad range of political views, some of whom were colleagues of Ivins, expressed doubts.

This suggests that right-wing extremists had an incentive to carry out the attacks. I believe there are others involved, either as accessories before or accessories after the fact. I believe that there are others out there. I believe there are others who could be charged with murder. Tom Daschle, the other Democratic senator targeted, believes Ivins was the sole culprit. Daschle questioning the vaccine. Daschle was the only targeted entity who had questioned the anthrax vaccine, which tied directly to the stated motive, it remains uncertain as to why the FBI did not report to the American people the fact that Sen.

Daschle co-signed a letter on 21 June with Rep. Gephardt to SecDef Rumsfeld questioning the vaccine and the punishments of U. Although the FBI matched the genetic origin of the attack spores to the spores in Ivins's flask RMR, the spores within flask RMR did not have the same silicon chemical "fingerprint" as the spores in the attack letters. The implication is that spores taken out of flask RMR had been used to grow new spores for the mailings. On April 22, , the U. National Research Council , the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences, convened a review committee that heard testimony from Henry Heine, a microbiologist who was formerly employed at the Army's biodefense laboratory in Maryland where Ivins had worked.

Heine told the panel that it was impossible that the deadly spores had been produced undetected in Ivins's laboratory, as maintained by the FBI. He testified that using the equipment at the army lab, at least a year of intensive work would have been required to produce the quantity of spores contained in the letters, and that such an intensive effort could not have escaped the attention of colleagues.

Heine also told the panel that lab technicians who worked closely with Ivins have told him they saw no such work. He stated further that where Ivins worked biological containment measures were inadequate to prevent the Anthrax spores from floating out of the laboratory into animal cages and offices.

The paper is largely based on the high level of tin detected in tests of the mailed anthrax, and the tin may have been used to encapsulate the spores, which required processing not possible in laboratories to which Ivins had access. According to the scientific article, this raises the possibility that Ivins was not the perpetrator or did not act alone.

Earlier in the investigation, the FBI had named tin as a substance "of interest" but the final report makes no mention of it and fails to address the high tin content. The chairwoman of the National Academy of Science panel that reviewed the FBI's scientific work and the director of a separate review by the Government Accountability Office said that the issues raised by the paper should be addressed.

Other scientists, such as Johnathan L. Kiel, a retired Air Force scientist who worked on anthrax for many years, did not agree with the authors' assessments — saying that the tin might be a random contaminant rather than a clue to complex processing. In , the chief of the Bacteriology Division at the Army laboratory, Patricia Worsham, said it lacked the facilities in to make the kind of spores in the letters. In , the government conceded that the equipment required was not available in the lab calling into question a key pillar of the FBI's case, that Ivins had produced the anthrax in his lab.

According to Worsham, the lab's equipment for drying spores, a machine the size of a refrigerator, was not in containment so that it would be expected that non-immunized personnel in that area would have become ill. Colleagues of Ivins at the lab have asserted that he couldn't have grown the quantity of anthrax used in the letters without their noticing it.

A spokesman for the Justice Department said that the investigators continue to believe that Ivins acted alone. Christos Tsonas thought the injury was curious, cleaned it and prescribed an antibiotic. After September 11, federal investigators found the medicine prescribed by Tsonas among the possessions of al-Haznawi. Tsonas came to believe that al-Haznawi's lesion "was consistent with cutaneous anthrax", a disease that causes skin lesions. The experts at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies interviewed Tsonas and prepared a memorandum that was circulated among top government officials.

The memorandum said that the diagnosis of cutaneous anthrax was "the most probable and coherent interpretation of the data available" and that "such a conclusion of course raises the possibility that the hijackers were handling anthrax and were the perpetrators of the anthrax letter attacks". They also attended flight school there. Some of the hijackers rented apartments from a real estate agent who was the wife of an editor of The Sun, a publication of American Media.

Congressman Rush Holt, whose district in New Jersey includes a mailbox from which anthrax letters are believed to have been mailed, called for an investigation of the anthrax attacks by Congress or by an independent commission he proposed in a bill entitled the Anthrax Attacks Investigation Act H. An official of the U. In what appears to have been a response to lingering skepticism, on September 16, , the FBI asked the National Academy of Sciences NAS to conduct an independent review of the scientific evidence that led the agency to implicate U.

Army researcher Bruce Ivins in the anthrax letter attacks of The NAS review officially got underway on April 24, In mid, the NAS committee held public sessions, in which presentations were made by scientists, including scientists from the FBI laboratories. One of the spores was still inside the "mother germ", yet it already had silicon inside its spore coat.

Included in the new materials were results of analyses performed on environmental samples collected from an overseas site. Those analyses yielded evidence of the Ames strain in some samples. NAS recommended a review of those investigations. The NAS committee released its report on February 15, , concluding that it was "impossible to reach any definitive conclusion about the origins of the anthrax in the letters, based solely on the available scientific evidence".

Justice Department's conclusion that a single-spore batch of anthrax maintained by Ivins at his laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland was the parent material for the spores in the anthrax letters. Dozens of buildings were contaminated with anthrax as a result of the mailings. Ninety-three bags of anthrax-contaminated mail were removed from the New York Post alone. The principal means of decontamination is fumigation with chlorine dioxide gas. The anthrax attacks, as well as the September 11, attacks, have spurred significant increases in U. The attack lead to the widespread confiscation and curtailment of US Mail, especially to US media companies: For many people and businesses that had resisted the cultural shift to e-mail, this was the moment that pushed them online.

Under heavy pressure from then Attorney General John D. Ashcroft , a bipartisan compromise in the House Judiciary Committee allowed legislation for the Patriot Act to move forward for full consideration later that month. Years after the attack, several anthrax victims reported lingering health problems including fatigue, shortness of breath and memory loss. A study proposed that the total number of people harmed by the anthrax attacks of should be raised to A postal inspector , William Paliscak, became severely ill and disabled after removing an anthrax-contaminated air filter from the Brentwood mail facility on October 19, Although his doctors, Tyler Cymet and Gary Kerkvliet , believe that the illness was caused by anthrax exposure, blood tests did not find anthrax bacteria or antibodies , and therefore the CDC does not recognize it as a case of inhalational anthrax.

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