Book Excerpt: 'Anthrax'

Oct. 9 -- Once believed to be a manifestation of "unholy fire" that consumed infected animals, anthrax is now being seen as a potentially devastating weapon of terror. Medical anthropologist Jeanne Guillemin's book "Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak" looks into the effects an anthrax outbreak can have on survivors and analyzes the prospects of biological warfare in the not-too-distant future. Read an excerpt from her book here.

Tuesday, June 2, 1992. After a long transatlantic flight from New York, our research team arrives in the new post-Soviet Russia, a nation that six months before did not exist. We are in the first stage of a trip to investigate the cause of the worst anthrax epidemic recorded in a modern industrial nation. The outbreak occurred in April and May 1979 in Sverdlovsk, an industrial city in the Ural Mountains, nine hundred miles east of Moscow. According to Soviet reports, by the time it was over, at least sixty-four people had died from this rare disease.

Leading the team is Matthew Meselson, a Harvard University biologist. I am the expedition's anthropologist, from Boston College, a Jesuit university that has unblinkingly supported my research for nearly twenty years. Matthew and I are also husband and wife. Doing research with a spouse can be problematic, especially when both are strong-minded individuals. Working on a politically charged issue in a foreign country can compound the difficulties, particularly when that country is the former Soviet Union, where censorship and political repression were the norm. But we have researched and written together before, on the "Yellow Rain" controversy. That investigation, during the 1980s, involved clarifying whether or not a dangerous mycotoxin had, with Soviet assistance, been used by Laos against its Hmong minority. By 1991, when Matthew began recruiting the Sverdlovsk team, I was well immersed in the details of this new problem and had made several trips to the Soviet Union, although none with the purpose and potential of this foray.

Matthew's commitment to discovering the Sverdlovsk epidemic's cause goes back to 1980, when he was consulted by the CIA after news of the event leaked to the West. In the years that followed, the world learned little about the outbreak, though speculations and suspicions abounded. Claims by a few Soviet dissidents that an explosion in a secret biological weapons laboratory caused thousands of deaths were countered by the Soviet government's contention that a much smaller number of people died from eating anthrax-infected meat sold on the black market. For years, Matthew, who has long been an advocate for the prohibition of chemical and biological weapons, has requested permission from the USSR for impartial experts to investigate the outbreak firsthand, but these requests have been denied. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, however, the political doors have opened for our travel to Sverdlovsk, which has reclaimed its prerevolutionary name, Yekaterinburg. We have allowed ourselves only two weeks to attempt to discover conclusive evidence about the source of the 1979 anthrax deaths.

My part of the assignment is to interview the victims' families, if I can find them. We have no record of names or addresses. Yekaterinburg, an industrial city with a population of 1.2 million, as yet has no public telephone directory. Nonetheless, I optimistically carry in my suitcase a hundred copies of a brief questionnaire that I have prepared and tested in translation. Our team brings other expertise to the expedition. The congenial Dr. Alexis Shelokov, who speaks fluent Russian, is a vaccine expert from the Salk Institute with a long career in public health. The more reserved Dr. David Walker is chief of pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. We are hoping that reports in the Russian press will prove true, that autopsy samples have been preserved by two pathologists who worked during the 1979 outbreak.

The fifth member of our team is veterinarian Martin Hugh-Jones from Louisiana State University, a member of the World Health Organization's Anthrax Research and Control Working Group, and an avid world traveler. The veterinary perspective is essential. Anthrax is a zoonosis, a disease that can travel from animals to humans. It is almost always associated with grazing animals, especially sheep, cows, goats, and horses, that pick it up from contaminated soil, by either eating or inhaling the tough spores that are the dormant form of its deadly bacteria.

Anthrax is as old as pastoralism and the origins of civilization. It might be the Sixth Plague, the sooty "morain," in the Book of Exodus that kills livestock and affects people with black spots. It is probably Apollo's "burning wind of plague" that begins Homer's Iliad.

Pack animals were his target first, and dogs but soldiers, too, soon felt transfixing pain from his hard shots, and pyres burned night and day.

In ancient Roman times, Virgil's Georgics lamented the shortage of animals caused by what again was most likely anthrax.

Ghastly Tisphone rages, and … drives before her Disease and Dread… The rivers and thirsty banks and sloping hills echo to the bleating of flocks and incessant lowing of kine. And now in droves she deals out death, and in the very stalls piles up the bodies, rotting with putrid foulness, till men learn to cover them in earth and bury them in pits.

Virgil also noted the other hazard of anthrax, that it spreads to humans, not by human-to-human contact, but by human contact with infected animals:

For neither might the hides be used, nor could one cleanse the flesh by water or master it by fire. They could not even sheer the fleeces, eaten up with sores and filth, nor touch the rotten web. Nay, if any man donned the loathsome garb, feverish blisters and foul sweat would run along his fetid limbs, and not long had he to wait ere the accursed fire was feeding on his stricken limbs.

Veterinarians can often tell an animal has died from anthrax by its sudden death and by the blood and bloody fluid that have oozed from its orifices. Anthrax bacteria in the decaying carcass are likely to be killed off by the bacteria of putrefaction; anaerobes (bacteria that can multiply without free oxygen) from the intestines do the clean-up work. The greater danger of anthrax lies in the blood that spills from the animal and drains into the soil, where the bacteria can then assume a protective spore form. (In a real sense, then, anthrax needs its host to die so that the disease may continue.) Relative temperature, along with varying blood and soil conditions, determines whether spores actually will form. Once formed, though, they can be devilishly hard to eliminate.