Anthrax accident in Sverdlovsk

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The Sverdlovsk anthrax accident occurred in 1979 in the Soviet city ​​of Sverdlovsk, now Yekaterinburg . In the Sverdlovsk-19 armaments plant, which was part of the Biopreparat network , biological weapons were manufactured. Due to a bug in the maintenance of the air filter in 1979 came on April 2, Anthrax - spores into the environment. There were around 100 fatalities, the exact number is still unknown. The cause of the accident was denied by the Soviet Union for years, and the consumption of contaminated meat from the area was responsible for this outbreak of anthrax.

background

The closed city of Sverdlovsk has been an important production center of the military-industrial complex of the Soviet Union since World War II . There were tanks , nuclear missiles and other weapons produced. In the vicinity there was the Kyshtym accident in 1957 , in which a military nuclear waste tank exploded, which led to the contamination of an area of ​​1,000 square kilometers. The Sverdlovsk Bioweapons Factory was built after the end of World War II based on documents from the Japanese bioweapons program that were captured during the conquest of Manchuria .

The anthrax bacterial strain that was produced was the most dangerous in the Soviet arsenal ("Anthrax 836"). This was isolated as a result of an earlier anthrax accident in Kirov in 1953. A leak in a bacteriological facility contaminated the municipal sewer system there. In 1956, the biologist Vladimir Sisow found a particularly contagious strain of anthrax in rodents in this area. It was planned to use this bacterial strain to arm SS-18 ICBMs , which were aimed, among other things, at American cities.

The accident

The produced anthrax culture had to be dried in order to obtain a fine powder that could be used as an aerosol . Large filters in the exhaust air systems were the only barriers between the anthrax dust and the environment. On the last Friday of March 1979, a technician removed a clogged filter while the drying machines were temporarily turned off. He left a written message but did not make a note in the log book and on Monday the machines were switched on again by mistake. City health officials were not informed immediately.

Some workers at a nearby ceramic factory fell ill. Almost all of the sick died within a week. The death toll was at least 105, but the exact number remains unknown because the KGB had the medical records and all other evidence destroyed, reports former Biopreparat deputy director Ken Alibek . However, two doctors, Lev Grinberg and Faina Abramova, who performed autopsies on all victims at Hospital No. 40 in Sverdlovsk, kept records and tissue samples under lock and key and made them available to Harvard professor Matthew Meselson's examinations after the end of the Soviet Union .

The only official statement that the anthrax outbreak was a military accident comes from Boris Yeltsin . In a newspaper interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda on May 27, 1992, he mentioned that the military was the cause of the outbreak.

The investigation

There was debate in the 1980s as to whether the anthrax outbreak was natural or whether it was an accident. In the event of an accident, there was a discussion as to whether this would mean a breach of the Bioweapons Convention of 1971. In the years immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, some smaller investigations were started by Russian scientists, which led to the accident being re-treated by the press.

A group of Western journalists led by Harvard Professor Matthew Meselson also gained access to the region in 1992. It was found that all victims had been living downwind at the time the spores were released as an aerosol. The livestock in the area was also affected. If the wind had blown in the direction of the city at this time, the pathogens would have spread to hundreds of thousands of people. The factory was closed to investigations.

Aftermath

The secret activities have been moved underground and new laboratories to work on highly contagious pathogens have been set up. Reports indicate that work is currently underway there on H4 strains of Bacillus anthracis . Its pathogenicity and resistance to antibiotics have been dramatically increased by genetic engineering .

literature

  • Lev Alexandrovich Fyodorov : Советское биологическое оружие: история, экология, политика. Международный Социально-экологический Союз, Moscow 2005. ISBN 5-88587-243-0
  • Matthew Meselson, Jeanne Guillemin, Martin Hugh-Jones, Alexander Langmuir, Ilona Popova, Alexis Shelokov, Olga Yampolskaya: The Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak of 1979. In: Science 266, 1202–1208, 1994. ( PDF ( Memento from May 2, 2015 on WebCite ))

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Ken Alibek and Stephen Handelman. Biohazard: The chilling true story of the largest covered biological weapons program in the world - Told from inside by the man who ran it. 1999. Delta (2000) ISBN 0-385-33496-6 .
  2. ^ A b David E. Hoffman: The Dead Hand - Reagan, Gorbachev and the untold story of the cold war arms race. Doubleday, 2009, ISBN 978-184831-253-1 .
  3. ↑ M. Meselson, J. Guillemin, M. Hugh-Jones, et al .: The Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak of 1979 Archived from the original on May 2, 2015. In: Science . 266, No. 5188, November 1994, pp. 1202-1208. doi : 10.1126 / science.7973702 . PMID 7973702 .
  4. ↑ Shoham D, Wolfson Z: The Russian biological weapons program: vanished or disappeared? . In: Crit. Rev. Microbiol. . 30, No. 4, 2004, pp. 241-261. doi : 10.1080 / 10408410490468812 . PMID 15646399 .

Coordinates: 56 ° 46 ′ 39 "  N , 60 ° 35 ′ 26"  E