Posted on 10/24/2001 10:04:57 PM PDT by FresnoDA
Thursday, October 25, 2001
The anthrax now spreading terror in America closely matches a strain developed as a US bioweapon in the 1960s, it has been claimed.
According to the evidence, the germ is not the same type as that mass-produced for weapons by Iraq or the former Soviet Union.
The FBI has confirmed that the anthrax sent to Florida, NBC, and Senator Tom Daschle were all the same strain, called "Ames".
This was the name given to a strain isolated by the US Department of Agriculture's veterinary laboratory in Ames, Iowa, in the 1930s and which still strikes cattle in western America.
But it also has a more sinister connotation, a special report in the magazine New Scientist claimed.
Experts analysing the anthrax used in the US attacks are comparing its DNA with a library of strains collected from all over the world.
The name "Ames" was given to one of the strains in this collection, which belonged to a freezer sample at the British biodefence establishment at Porton Down, Wiltshire, in the 1980s.
Porton Down had acquired it from the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases in Maryland, said New Scientist.
Those who compiled the library said it was the same strain the US used when it produced anthrax weapons. The program ended in 1969 and the mass-produced anthrax was destroyed, but samples were kept both by the US and its allies.
"To be identified as Ames by these scientists, therefore, the anthrax used in the recent attacks must either be the American military strain or one that's very similar," said New Scientist.
One expert interviewed by the magazine, Martin Hugh-Jones of Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, said the Ames strain was "a challenge to any vaccine".
When laboratory animals immunised with a vaccine now being given to thousands of American troops were exposed to anthrax, many were still killed by the Ames strain.
Ken Alibek, former deputy head of the Soviet bioweapons program, said neither the Soviets nor the Iraqis mass-produced Ames. Like Britain in the 1940s, Iraq favoured another strain called Vollum, isolated at Oxford in 1930, which has been identified in samples from the Iraqi Al Hakam plant.
Alibek also dismissed claims that the powder used in the attacks could only have been milled in a high-technology plant, implying some level of state involvement.
His view was supported by a secret experiment last year called Project Bacchus in which staff at the US Department of Defence covertly produced a kilogram of bacterial powder similar to that used in the anthrax attacks.
The powder was milled to a few micrometres - the right size to lodge in the lungs - using machines easily available in the US, said New Scientist.
The fact that the attacks had caused relatively few inhalation cases so far indicated that the powder was not blended with anti-caking chemicals used in anthrax weapons to promote airborne spread.
This was the secret of "weaponised" anthrax, Alibek told New Scientist. He added that sending anthrax in the mail was a "very primitive" method of distribution.
He still doesn't get it. It's not an attack. It's an advertisment.
Seems to work in regard to creating a Terror Scare!
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What is important is who has it now.
I really, really, really, hope you're wrong. But I fear you're right. This isn't an attack,it's a test and, like you said, an advertisement. Now we know that they can do this and we can only imagine what they might do next.
1. "Ames" is a generic name for certain kind of anthrax, not a particular strain
2. Anthrax in the letters was expertly weaponized: right size, right additive, electrostatically charged
3. This article is BS
Preliminary reports suggested that the Florida anthrax may have been identified as the Ames strain of anthrax, so named because veterinarians at the National Animal Disease Center in Ames, Iowa isolated it from sick cattle. Because the Ames strain was particularly deadly, it became the most common one for laboratory studies, including tests of the anthrax vaccine given to military personnel.
But if the germs seen in Florida and New York do turn out to be Ames, that won't mean that the perpetrators got them from Iowa. The Iowa lab that first collected the strain no longer has a stock.
"It's a very cold trail," said James Roth, a professor of veterinary microbiology Iowa State University, in Ames, which never had the Ames strain but does have others.
While there's no more Ames strain in Iowa labs, it has found its way into labs around the world. Until 1997, a Virginia company called the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) kept samples of anthrax and other germs and sent them to dozens of labs requesting them for research purposes.
The company no longer sends anthrax out to anyone, but in the late 1980s it did send samples to countries around the world, including Iraq. The sale was legal at the time -- Iraq was not considered a hostile country.
So that means that both the Soviets and Iraq produced the Ames strain of the anthrax, but not in mass quantities, as far as he knew.
As far as he knew.
The Aborigines were the CIVILIZED ones!
Charles Emerson Winchester
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