Biological alarm in Washington

[Guest guest]

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/10/18/tularemia/

 

 

Biological alarm in Washington

Did terrorists attack Washington with a deadly pathogen?

 

By Mark Benjamin

 

Oct. 18, 2005 | On Sept. 24, 2005, tens of thousands of protesters

marched past the White House and flooded the National Mall near 17th

Street and Constitution Avenue. They had arrived from all over the

country for a day of speeches and concerts to protest the war in Iraq.

It may have been the biggest antiwar rally since Vietnam. A light rain

fell early in the day and most of the afternoon was cool and overcast.

 

Unknown to the crowd, biological-weapons sensors, scattered for miles

across Washington by the Department of Homeland Security, were quietly

doing their work. The machines are designed to detect killer

pathogens. Sometime between 10 a.m. on Sept. 24 and 10 a.m. on Sept.

25, six of those machines sucked in trace amounts of deadly bacteria

called Francisella tularensis. The government fears it is one of six

biological weapons most likely to be used against the United States.

 

It was an alarming reading. The biological-weapons detection system in

Washington had never set off any alarms before. There are more than

150 sensors spread across 30 of the most populated cities in America.

But this was the first time that six sensors in any one place had

detected a toxin at the same time. The sensors are also located miles

from one another, suggesting that the pathogen was airborne and

probably not limited to a local environmental source.

 

William Stanhope, associate director for special projects at the St.

Louis University School of Public Health's Institute for Biosecurity,

has been closely following scattered government and news reports about

the incident. He's convinced it was a botched terrorist attack. " I

think we were lucky and the terrorists were not good, " he says. " I am

stunned that this has not been more of a story. "

 

The DHS scrambled for three days to confirm just what may have been in

the air that day. On Sept. 27, it turned for help to the Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC did its own tests, and on

Sept. 30 -- six days after the deadly pathogens set off the sensors

and well into the incubation period for tularemia -- alerted public

health officials across the country to be on the lookout for

tularemia, the deadly disease caused by F. tularensis.

 

" It is alarming that health officials ... were only notified six days

after the bacteria was first detected, " House Government Reform

chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., wrote in an Oct. 3 letter to Homeland

Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. " Have DHS and CDC analysts been

able to determine if the pathogen detected was naturally occurring or

the result of a terrorist attack? "

 

Government officials say the sensors detected a natural event. " There

is no known nexus to terror or criminal behavior, " Russ Knocke,

spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, told the Washington

Post. " We believe this to be environmental. " " It is not unreasonable

that this is a natural occurrence, " says Von Roebuck, spokesman for

the CDC. " There are still no cases of tularemia. "

 

However, Salon has spoken to numerous people who were at the

Washington Mall on Sept. 24. Four say they got sick days later with

symptoms that mirror tularemia.

 

Relatively speaking, F. tularensis is an effective biological weapon.

A little bit goes a long, deadly way. A tiny amount -- 10 microscopic

organisms -- can cause tularemia. After an incubation period of three

to five days (it can range from one to 14 days), tularemia attacks the

lymph nodes, lungs, spleen, liver and kidneys. Symptoms include fever,

chills, headache, muscle aches, joint pain, dry cough and progressive

weakness. Left untreated, tularemia can kill 50 percent of those

who've contacted it. Conventional strains of the bacteria do respond

to antibiotics, reducing death rates to as low as 2 percent.

 

As with anthrax, the U.S. military weaponized and stockpiled F.

tularensis in the 1960s. The Soviets are said to have engineered

strains to be resistant to antibiotics and vaccines. A World Health

Organization Committee in 1969 estimated that dispersal of 110 pounds

of F. tularensis over a city of 5 million would incapacitate 250,000

people and 19,000 of them would die.

 

" The biggest concern is that a terrorist would use the organism

because it has such a high infectivity rate with a low number of

organisms, " says Dr. Steven Hinrichs, director of the University of

Nebraska Center for Biosecurity.

 

Scientists have long said that if terrorists use tularemia in an

attack, it will look like this: The bacteria will show up in the air

in a city, rather than the country, and perhaps at a major event.

 

" If Francisella tularensis were used as a bioweapon, the bacteria

would likely be made airborne so they could be inhaled, " the CDC warns

in an information sheet on tularemia. In a June 2001 consensus

statement titled " Tularemia as a Biological Weapon, " the American

Medical Association warned an attack would come in " an aerosol

release " in " a densely populated area. "

 

There is no evidence that terrorists have ever used tularemia as a

biological weapon before, but it may have been used by the Soviets

against German troops during the 1942 Battle of Stalingrad, according

to a report by the Council on Foreign Relations. The report adds that

microbe stocks in Russia, Kazakhstan, Georgia and Uzbekistan are

insecure and terrorists could potentially steal weaponized strains of

tularemia from them.

 

So far, there are no signs of a tularemia outbreak in the U.S. But

because it comes on like the flu, it is unclear if the government

would even know if a few people from the Mall that day scattered

across the United States had tularemia. The amount detected in the

sensors suggests a very small amount was in the air.

 

" Clinicians don't often think of it, and it has a non-specific

presentation, " says Jeff Bender, an infectious disease epidemiologist

at the University of Minnesota. " It is basically flu-like symptoms

that sound like every other disease you can get. "

 

Like anthrax, F. tularensis is a naturally occurring bacteria. It is

typically found in small mammals like squirrels, water rats and

rabbits, which is why tularemia has also been called rabbit fever.

Those critters get it mostly from bites by ticks, flies and

mosquitoes. People have contacted tularemia from insect bites or from

handling or eating infected material or skinning dead animals. F.

tularensis is a concern mostly in central and Western states,

particularly Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Montana.

Nearly all cases occur in rural areas, according to the CDC. Around

125 people in the United States get tularemia each year. Most cases in

the United States appear to have come from insect bites or handling

animals.

 

Although insects mostly transmit the disease, there have been cases

where the bacteria appears to have become aerosolized in the natural

environment. Bacteria from a dead animal could contaminate some soil.

In the right conditions, the bacteria might stay viable in the

environment for weeks. The soil might then get stirred up and cause

the bacteria to be airborne. Fifteen cases of tularemia were reported

in Martha's Vineyard in 2000, apparently after lawn mowers or brush

cutters stirred up contaminated material into the air. One person

died. Public officials have theorized something similar happened in

Washington: The bacteria got into the soil on the mall and it was the

marchers themselves who kicked it up into the air.

 

It is unclear if such a scenario explains what happened on Sept. 24.

" The fact that it happened in six locations would have supported an

attack scenario, " says Hinrichs from the University of Nebraska Center

for Biosecurity. Hinrichs has not seen any test results proving that

what was in the air that day was a deadly pathogen. Still, he says

that government officials would have to consider the incident as more

than a natural event. " To have found it in all six would have raised

their level of suspicion, " says Hinrichs. " It could be a failed attack. "

 

The sensors that picked up on the pathogen are part of the Department

of Homeland Security's Bio Watch program. Since Sept. 11, sensors have

been placed in 30 of the most populated cities in the United States.

Most cities have roughly 12 sensors, although Washington is thought to

have more.

 

The exact locations of the sensors are a secret. Some are piggybacked

onto existing air monitoring stations, used by the EPA to measure

pollution. The sensors look for signs of the six pathogens scientists

consider most likely to be used as biological weapons by terrorists,

including F. tularensis. (Other pathogens include anthrax, smallpox

and plague.)

 

Sept. 24 was not the first time the Bio Watch sensors had detected

possible biological weapons pathogens. Since the system was deployed,

sensors around the United States have identified pathogens that could

be used as biological weapons on five separate occasions, Jeffrey

Stiefel, program manager for Bio Watch chemical countermeasures, said

at an open lecture at the National Institutes of Health on Oct. 6. In

all of those cases, the detections were apparently the result of

natural phenomena. Indeed, some critics have long worried that one

weakness of the Bio Watch program might be the difficulty of

distinguishing between natural events and terrorism.

 

In 2003, two Bio Watch sensors detected F. tularensis near Houston in

what the government later determined was a natural event, though the

environmental source was never identified. But this was the first time

anything popped up in Washington. " This is the first time we have had

a situation there that I am aware of, " says the CDC's Roebuck. It is

also the first time six sensors simultaneously picked up on the same

thing. " It has never happened that way before -- that many, " Stiefel

of the DHS said in his lecture.

 

Just after the antiwar rally, DHS officials faced a perplexing

situation. While the six sensors detected something, at first it was

not clear what it was.

 

Filters are removed from the sensors usually every 24 hours. A

laboratory then performs a preliminary test to look for signs of a

deadly pathogen. Six filters from the Mall showed the existence of a

possible pathogen during that first round of tests.

 

A second round of tests could confirm the presence of F. tularensis

using polymerase chain reaction techniques, which detect DNA

signatures. The second round of tests was conducted sometime between

Sept. 25 and Sept. 27. But in the second round of tests, none of the

samples from the filters was a full DNA confirmation that what was

floating around Washington that day was definitely F. tularensis. But

it looked like it could be.

 

" The collectors were concentrated along the Mall, " Stiefel said in his

lecture. " That starts to say, 'Something looks a little funny here.

The bottom line here is that there is something out there. "

 

This posed a quandary for department officials. Under the Bio Watch

program, substances detected that are not confirmed positive pathogens

can be ignored. But six sensors had detected the same thing in

Washington during the biggest peace march in a generation. And

Washington, D.C., is not exactly tularemia country.

 

There was another troubling thing. One of the sensors that went off

was located at the Lincoln Memorial on the far western end of the

Mall. Another was located near Judiciary Square, roughly two miles to

the east and two blocks north of the Mall. A third was at the Army's

Fort McNair, more than two miles from the Lincoln Memorial down the

Potomac River past the Mall, on the point of land where the Washington

Channel and Anacostia River meet. The locations of the other three

sensors have not been disclosed.

 

This makes a natural event on Sept. 24 more difficult to imagine.

Under the government's scenario, soil on or near the Mall somehow

became contaminated with the bacteria, perhaps from the body or blood

of a dead or injured small rabbit or squirrel. That soil then got

stirred up -- possibly by the marchers themselves -- and floated

across the Mall and beyond. Marchers and book festival attendees

contacted by Salon say it was dusty on the Mall in the morning. But it

rained early that day and stayed moist, making the dust theory perhaps

less likely, at least after that rain.

 

" One sensor, I'd say maybe, " says biosecurity expert Stanhope of the

dust theory. " Two sensors is a stretch. Six sensors? I'm sorry, you

don't have enough money to buy enough martinis to make me believe that

it is naturally occurring at six different sites. I don't think you

could get me that drunk to believe that. "

 

As for how the bacteria may have erupted through natural processes,

says Hinrichs of the University of Nebraska Center, " I can't imagine

how it could have happened. " Asked if he could imagine a scenario

whereby F. tularensis could float around the Mall in the dust, Bender,

an infectious disease epidemiologist, says, " Theoretically, it is

possible. " Asked if it could have been an attack, he says, " The

question you are asking, 'Was this real or not?' That is a very valid

question. "

 

Another possibility is that somebody was testing U.S. biological

weapons defenses. How sensitive are the sensors? How quickly and

effectively can the government react?

 

" The Department of Homeland Security would have to consider the

possibility that it was neither natural nor an attack, but that it was

a testing of the system, " says Alan Pearson, a former DHS official,

who is now the biological and chemical weapons director at the Center

for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a nonpartisan organization.

" Was somebody trying to see what would happen? "

 

Regardless of the source, Pearson says, he was troubled that it took

the government nearly a week to alert the public. " It points out that

the system is still not working fast enough, " he says. " If it turned

out to be something that really affected people, which it turned out

not to be, the system was too slow. "

 

The federal government says that the most compelling argument against

a terrorist attack is that nobody got tularemia. That may be true. But

some people say they caught something that day.

 

Mike Phelps, 45, says he attended the rally in Washington that day,

traveling round trip by bus from Raleigh, N.C. On Sept. 27, he came

down with a fever, sore throat and headache. Within days, he was

coughing up dark phlegm. When he blew his nose, it would bleed. " It

was gross, " he says. " I literally vomited out cup loads of phlegm.

Most of it was dark-colored. I've never had anything like this before. "

 

Phelps' doctor said he had pneumonia and prescribed antibiotics. A few

days later, Phelps read about the tularemia scare and called his

doctor. His doctor told him that if it was tularemia, he would have

prescribed him the same antibiotics. Phelps says he called the CDC but

was transferred to an automated system. Frustrated, he hung up.

 

Several members of the women's peace group, Code Pink, also from North

Carolina, who attended the march, say they got sick afterward.

Stephanie Eriksen, a 46-year-old network engineer for AT & T, says she

developed swollen glands and cold symptoms in her throat and chest.

She developed a persistent cough that still lingers. " My throat has

still not recovered completely, " she says. Eriksen says her

14-year-old daughter marched in Washington and got sick. She was

tested for strep throat. Eriksen said the results were negative.

 

Aimee Schmidt, a Code Pink member and student at North Carolina State,

says that she developed flu-like symptoms and a raging headache that

lasted three days after the march. She says her eyes hurt and her

whole body ached. She never went to the doctor. " I made a choice, wise

or not, to just deal with it, " she says.

 

Of course, there are countless benign explanations for these symptoms.

And it could be true that nobody got sick from F. tularensis on Sept.

24. But bioterror experts say that doesn't prove it wasn't a terrorist

attack. The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, they point out, made several

unsuccessful biological weapons attacks before the sarin attack in the

Tokyo subway system on March 20, 1995. Previous efforts by the cult to

release a botulin toxin from a vehicle in 1990, and anthrax spores

from a building in 1993, apparently failed to sicken or kill anyone

because of faulty dispersal methods.

 

Terrorists may have made a similar screw-up in Washington on Sept. 24.

" One of my working hypotheses is that there was an attack and they

failed in their dispersion system, " says Stanhope. " They dispersed an

incredibly low concentration. "

 

Government assurances that there is " nothing to see here " are

reminiscent of the federal government's initial response to the

infamous anthrax attacks in fall of 2001. In an Oct. 4, 2001, press

conference, then-Department of Health and Human Services Secretary

Tommy Thompson emphasized that anthrax occurs naturally in the

environment and that " there's no evidence of terrorism. "

 

" I want everyone to understand that sporadic cases of anthrax do

[naturally] occur in the United States, " Thompson said. Thompson said

the first victim to fall ill, a Florida man, was an " outdoorsman " and

that investigators were looking into a stream he may have drank from

in North Carolina. That man, Bob Stevens, 63, died the next day from

inhaling weaponized anthrax that was apparently sent to the offices of

American Media Inc. in Boca Raton, Fla.

 

Soon after, anthrax was sent to the office of Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D.

Government officials claimed it was a " common variety " and not the

weaponized agent most feared. Of course, further investigation proved

otherwise.

 

Currently, the investigation into what happened on Sept. 24 is

ongoing. Government officials have apparently been taking soil samples

around the Mall, attempting to pinpoint a natural source for F.

tularensis. In the meantime, on Oct. 5, the National Institutes of

Health announced it would award two contracts worth a total of $60

million to develop new tularemia vaccine candidates. The announcement

said nothing of the events 11 days earlier.

[Guest guest]

>>>>>>>>>Terrorists may have made a similar screw-up in Washington on Sept.

24.

" One of my working hypotheses is that there was an attack and they

failed in their dispersion system, " says Stanhope. " They dispersed an

incredibly low concentration. " <<<<<<<<<<<<<<

I dont see terrorist attacking Anti-War groups. That doesnt make any sense.

Donna

 

On 10/18/05, califpacific <califpacific wrote:

>

> http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/10/18/tularemia/

>

>

> Biological alarm in Washington

> Did terrorists attack Washington with a deadly pathogen?

>

>

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

Nope, 'terrorists' would not

want that, would they.

So who could have done it?

Hmmm, I wonder.

Tom

 

 

, Donna Arnold

<donna.arnold@g...> wrote:

>

> >>>>>>>>>Terrorists may have made a similar screw-up in Washington

on Sept.

> 24.

> " One of my working hypotheses is that there was an attack and they

> failed in their dispersion system, " says Stanhope. " They dispersed

an

> incredibly low concentration. " <<<<<<<<<<<<<<

> I dont see terrorist attacking Anti-War groups. That doesnt make

any sense.

> Donna

>

> On 10/18/05, califpacific <califpacific@g...> wrote:

> >

> > http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/10/18/tularemia/

> >

> >

> > Biological alarm in Washington

> > Did terrorists attack Washington with a deadly pathogen?