Posted on 10/25/2001 1:38:00 PM PDT by SAMWolf
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Genetic testing shows the bacteria in the anthrax-by-mail attacks have not been bioengineered and are quite similar to natural strains that sicken animals, federal health officials said Thursday.
"These strains cannot be distinguished from other anthrax isolates that are known to have caused disease in barnyard animals" in the United States and Europe, said Dr. Julie Gerberding of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
While CDC says the anthrax so far is susceptible to penicillin, preliminary tests suggest it also may contain an early signal of developing penicillin resistance. Thus CDC said Thursday that patients with inhaled anthrax should not be treated with penicillin alone.
But from an investigative viewpoint, that discovery "is entirely consistent with the natural biology of the organism," Gerberding said. In nature, anthrax strains often show that chemical signal.
"We have absolutely no evidence to suggest these isolates have been genetically altered or engineered in any way," she added. "We're quite relieved that their susceptibility profile looks like what we would expect from a naturally occurring strain."
So far, the CDC hasn't finished genetic tests on anthrax spores recovered from the Washington postal facility where two workers have died and two others become infected with inhaled anthrax. Those tests are important to help determine whether the anthrax came from the same batch as the bacteria in letters mailed to Florida, New York and a Senate office.
Then there's the nation's other antibiotic resistance worry -- that some 10,000 people now are taking Cipro while CDC figures out whether they were exposed to anthrax and thus are at risk. All of that Cipro use, infectious disease specialists worry, could cause everyday bacteria to mutate so that Cipro won't be useful against other infections.
The CDC won't be able to detect if that's happening right away, Gerberding said, "but I would be surprised if it was a zero impact."
International Herald Tribune, Sept. 5, 2001
Secret U.S. Project Simulates Terrorist Germ Factory
Judith Miller New York Times Service
Wednesday, September 5, 2001
CAMP 12, NEVADA TEST SITE, Nevada In a nondescript mustard-colored building that was once a military recreation hall and barbershop, the Pentagon has built a germ factory that could make enough lethal microbes to wipe out entire cities.
Adjacent to the pool tables, the shuffleboard and the bar stands a gleaming stainless steel cylinder, the 13-gallon (50-liter) fermenter in which germs can be cultivated.
The apparatus, which includes a latticework of pipes and other equipment, was made entirely with commercially available components bought from hardware stores and other suppliers for about $1 million, a pittance for a weapon that could deliver death on such a large scale.
The unit was built by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, an arm of the Pentagon that works to contain the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Officials said that the project was intended to assess how hard it would be for a terrorist or rogue nation to assemble a germ factory.
The agency also wanted to determine if a small operation such as this one produced any telltale "signatures" - sounds, chemical emissions or patterns of operation that could help intelligence agencies find such plants.
"The project also showed us how relatively simple it would be for a terrorist to assemble such a facility without being detected," said Jay Davis, the former agency director who, with the Pentagon's permission, showed the secret plant to a Times reporter and a team from ABC News.
Officials stressed that the plant produced harmless biopesticides during test runs in 1999 and 2000 and never was used to make anthrax or any other lethal pathogen. Mr. Davis would not specify quantities but said that, if the output had been anthrax germs, it would have been enough to kill at least 10,000 people.
...
UK Sunday Times, Oct. 21, 2001
The Invisible Enemy
The idea behind Project Bacchus, a secret experiment by the US Department of Defence, was simple. Here's a little money, said Pentagon chiefs to a team of scientists. Go and see if you can build a biological warfare factory. The catch was that they could use only materials bought on the open market.
The Pentagon chiefs did not tell Congress of their plan to create anthrax, or at least a harmless variant, in a way that would simulate how terrorists might covertly make the deadly bacterium. It just quietly doled out the money and let the scientists get on with it.
Operating as ordinary members of the public, the team set out in 1999 to build a small-scale laboratory in Nevada. A local hardware store supplied pipes and filters. A firm in Europe dispatched a 50-litre fermenter unit suitable for culturing germs. A Midwest company provided a milling machine capable of grinding dried material into powder.
As the scientists grew and refined their bugs, they aroused no suspicion. By summer last year they had produced 2lb of germ materials, including one that simulated anthrax, according to Jay Davis, the recent director of the Defence Threat Reduction Agency, the Pentagon unit that ran the experiment. No western intelligence agency had detected the operation, let alone attempted to stop it.
"The project had proven its point - a nation or bioterrorist with the requisite expertise could easily assemble an anthrax factory from off-the-shelf materials," said Judith Miller, co-author of a new book, Germs, on biological warfare.
"The results suggested that even with precious little money, a group of terrorists could build and operate a small-scale germ weapons plant."
Long aware that its enemies overseas had been working on biological weapons, the US had now proved that terrorists could be making deadly bugs even within its own borders.
...
Arab, if I may call you that :), bacteria CAN develop resistance to antibiotics, but it usually occurrs because a patient won't take the prescription correctly or if it prescribed too frequently. If used judiciously, it is unlikely an organism will become tolerant.
There isn't a week that goes by in my practice where a patient will tell me "I started an antibiotic I had left over from the last time I had a toothache". People take antibiotics like pain pills, only when needed. What that does is it puts a dose of the antibiotic into the bloodstream and it begins killing the bug. However they then skip a few doses and the level of the drug drops and the bug starts to rapidly reproduce again, only this time there are more mutated that have a resistance to the antibiotic. Given this roller coaster, the resistant bug is given a better chance to grow, and eventually becomes the main pathogen.
I'm in a hurry here, and I know I didn't explain this well, so if you have any questions, let me know.
My head hurts.
You forgot--THREE head-shots from a bolt-action inside of 10 seconds, targets moving at 35+ MPH, firing DOWN from the 6th story at about 300 yards.
Oswald could have earned a very good living as a trick-shot expert if he hadn't wasted his time in Dallas warehouses..
If this analysis is correct, Bush may not have any choice but to blink. I do think it might be an idea to declare a national emergency and intern Middle Eastern aliens, but it seems the general feeling is this would be a hate crime, and we should all just sit tight and hope for the best.
Worse. According to a graph in a recent book Germs, by Judith Miller et al, the USSR made 4000 TONS of anthrax.
True, much of what they made was resistant to some antibiotics, but think about it. The Russians made the really nasty strains to put into ICBM's and launch as a doomsday weapon, I think.
For using anthrax as a more subtle weapon, no reason to use an antibiotic resistant strain! Why? If you are unknowingly exposed to a lethal load of anthrax spores it doesn't matter if it is an antibiotic resistant strain, because by the time you get symptoms, you are effectively dead and it doesn't matter what antibiotic you receive. Inhalational anthrax has up to 90% mortality by report...maybe it is a bit less, but it is still very high.
From a military planning standpoint, you don't want to kill everyone anyway...sick people tie up resources.
The fact that this anthrax was prepared to be 1-3 micron in size...and that doesn't necessarily require mechanical milling, but freeze drying and coating with the proper substance, means this was done by someone with access to information held by state sponsored biowar labs. Could have been a rogue Russian microbiologist, or Iraq. But this was weaponized anthrax, make no mistake about it. And the most likely source was Islamic terrorists.
How much do they have, and was this postal delivery just a trial run? Probably, and that's what is scary. The worst may still be yet to come...in fact, it may have already happened, but we won't know until 7-10 days later.
"...Once quantities of a BA have been produced, steps can be taken to enhance the stability of the product, both in storage and post-dissemination. Some agents, such as anthrax, naturally form spores that allow them to remain viable for long periods of time. However many other pathogens tend to break down rapidly under environmental stresses (either in storage or post-dissemination). One of the most effective methods of stabilisation is the process of lyophilization or ‘freeze-drying’. The process involves the rapid freezing and subsequent dehydration under a high vacuum; a lyophilizer reduces a solution of bacteria and a sugar stabiliser into a small solid 'cake' of agent, which can then be milled into particles of a desired size. Freeze-drying makes storage and transport easier and safer than with liquid agents. More significantly, drying can result in a marked increase in potency, with the particles being inhaled directly in to the lungs. Again, the growth of the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries has resulted in the proliferation of this kind of technology, allowing potential bio-weaponeers to refine their weapons much more effectively.
Another highly effective means of protecting agents from environmental stresses is microencapsulation. This entails the coating of agent particles with a protective polymer layer (gelatine, cellulose). The coating can protect the agent from a range of stresses such as sunlight and freezing. Such technology allows the weaponisation of agents, which would otherwise be unable to survive in a post-dissemination environment and as such, represents a significant advance in BW technology..."
Dancer :)
Yikes...I am not happy to hear that anthrax can be engineered to be antibiotic resistant. Dancer.
Increasing? No. The din of the 'tards has been pretty loud for a long time.
And geeze, I'm a Libertarian and most likely to be suspicious of government, but these yahoos are like paranoid to the point of being unAmerican. I'm embarrassed for Conservatism that there are so many loonies on this forum allegedly representing them.
I think the government is reacting as best it can to unknown threats -- and like I say, I'm a Libertarian. This whole paranoia about the government spinning lie after lie is just giving me the creeps about some so-called Conservatives real motivation.
I think the time now is to kill terrorists and get back to reducing government waste and so forth later. We have priorities here -- and killing terrorists is top 'o the list.
Deep in the article is the real news. Resistant anthrax. How did it become resistant to antibiotics if it has only affected the initial people? The original sources would not have been exposed to anti-biotics in nature, they would have to have been exposed with human intervention.
So we have anthrax that is the ideal size, not too big, not too small but just right. We have anthrax that might be resistant to penicilin (didn't one of the letters suggest taking penicilin? Interesting.)We have anthrax that is easily made airborne.
So therefore the CDC concludes it came from natural sources. Ok, sure, whatever.
Except we have no reports of anyone being infected by someone who is on antibiotics. It is highly unlikely that any of us will be infected by someone who contracts anthrax and additionally all those exposed so far had first hand exposure from the letters. How do you explain resistance unless the anthrax was previously exposed it to anti-biotics ?
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