THE anthrax attack of 2001 is over. No more powder-laced letters have turned
up in the mail since October and no new infections since November. Unless spores
are still lurking in someone’s lungs, office or mail, there will be no more
victims.
Americans must now decide how to move on from an attack that claimed
relatively few lives, but was a huge kick in the teeth for a country still
reeling after 11 September. To make matters worse, as Â鶹´«Ă˝
goes to press, the FBI still has no culprit—or even a firm suspect, to
judge by the doubling of the reward to $2.5 million last month.
Investigators are virtually certain of one thing, though: it was an inside
job. The anthrax attacker is an American scientist—and worse, one from
within the US’s own biodefence establishment. And only now, four months on from
the posting of the first letters, are the frightening implications of that
beginning to sink in.
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America’s experience of bioterrorism was, above all, one of institutional
failure and a breakdown in the trust on which those institutions are based. The
US had its own bioweapons research turned against it—by one of its own. To
add to the embarrassment, advances in the massive investigation so far owe more
to the serendipity of a few researchers than to any organised response to
bioterrorism.
The first anthrax victim was Robert Stevens, a photo editor on a tabloid
newspaper in Florida who died of the inhaled form of the disease on 5 October.
Even before his death, the bacteria in his blood had been whisked off to
Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, where Paul Keim, a specialist in
bacterial evolution, has a collection of genetic variants of anthrax.
His lab quickly worked out what type it was. Nine days later, after anthrax
had struck one of Stevens’s colleagues and a television station in New York, the
FBI made an announcement. The infections clearly weren’t natural, and the Ames
strain of anthrax was responsible.
Confusion reigned as to exactly what this meant (see “Mix-ups and muddles”).
But the crucial discovery, as revealed by Â鶹´«Ă˝
(27 October 2001, p 4),
was that Stevens’s bacteria were dead ringers for an
unusually virulent strain from the US Army Medical Research Institute for
Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland. And USAMRIID circulated these
particular bacilli to only a few collaborators.
Even getting this far owed much to luck. Anthrax DNA hardly varies at all,
and strains have been genetically distinguishable only since the late 1990s.
Currently only Keim’s technique, which counts variations in the number of repeat
sequences of DNA at 50 different places in the genome, can pinpoint the USAMRIID
lineage.
Investigators were only able do so because a few scientists happened to be
keen on this kind of research, not because there was an organised system for
tracking bioweapons. The attacker may not even have realised how precisely the
source of his bacteria could be traced.
But the genetic trail may now have gone cold. Investigators hoped that
samples from the dozen labs holding USAMRIID’s strain would be sufficiently
different to reveal where the attacker got his bacteria. They include three US
military facilities: the navy’s medical research lab, the army’s Dugway Proving
Ground in Utah, and Battelle, a defence contractor based in Ohio.
So far, all the samples tested in Keim’s analysis have been identical. His
lab is now working with the Institute for Genomic Research in Maryland to try
and find more revealing differences in non-repeat DNA. But it’s not looking
good—the labs have clearly been sharing the same bacteria.
Hope now rests on analysing the way the anthrax was turned into the fine,
floating powder that makes it a weapon. This was the attacker’s masterstroke.
The five envelopes held just 2 grams of powder each—yet they managed to
contaminate a huge area.
No one realised just how huge until postal workers started getting anthrax.
Two died after Washington hospitals diagnosed flu and sent them
home—despite the publicity about anthrax in the men’s workplace. Spores
were then found all over the targeted offices, in postal equipment, and even on
unrelated mail. Fears that contaminated mail might start to claim susceptible
people far and wide seemed justified when two women in the Bronx and
Connecticut, with no link to any known contamination, died of anthrax.
There was no excuse for not knowing how insidious weaponised anthrax can be.
Ken Alibek, former head of the Soviet anthrax programme who now works in the US,
knows how it infested his production plants—but investigators didn’t ask
him.
Canadian biodefence scientists had even measured how easily a harmless
relative of anthrax could spread though postal machines when it was weaponised.
They warned the US the day Stevens’s case was announced—but their e-mail
was ignored, and US officials only found out about their work after postal
workers had died.
Yet to the expert eye, the envelope opened in Senator Tom Daschle’s office on
15 October obviously contained weaponised anthrax. It even resembled the powder
the US military concocted in the 1960s
(Â鶹´«Ă˝, 3 November 2001, p 5).
Its particles were a uniform 1.5 to 3 micrometres across, the optimal size
for inhalation. It was highly concentrated, with no debris, coated to prevent
clumping, and even contained an unusual form of silica, a drying agent used in
the US process.
The US government insists it destroyed all its old weaponised anthrax. But in
December, an American journalist broke the news that Dugway had been making more
for nearly four years under the tutelage of Bill Patrick, who ran the anthrax
programme before 1969. It is not clear whether Dugway had told the FBI.
The lab had a reasonable motive: to test anthrax detectors, and study the
powder’s behaviour. Officials could have used that information to respond to the
attack. Yet apparently they didn’t—even though the Canadian research,
which could have saved lives, used bacteria weaponised at Dugway.
But a clearer picture is now emerging. The attacker used the US military
strain, and something like the US weaponisation process. Dugway undoubtedly
weaponised Ames. The attacker either acquired 10 grams of the Dugway product, or
the recipe for making it. Chemical analysis of the last anthrax letter
discovered, addressed to Senator Charles Leahy and opened at USAMRIID, should
tell which. If the powder isn’t identical to Dugway’s, someone else weaponised
it. Tracing the chemicals used might lead to the perpetrator.
One more clue points to someone who worked at USAMRIID itself. A US marine
base got a letter in late September, after the anthrax letters were posted but
before Stevens was diagnosed, calling an Egyptian-born scientist, Ayaad Assaad,
a bioterrorist.
Assaad was laid off by USAMRIID in 1997, and was harassed while he worked
there. He was cleared of the bioterrorist charge. Barbara Rosenberg, a
bioweapons expert for the Federation of American Scientists, suspects the letter
was the real attacker’s attempt to frame Assaad by capitalising on anti-Muslim
feeling after 11 September. It revealed an insider’s familiarity with
USAMRIID.
The attacker also masqueraded, unconvincingly, as a Muslim in the anthrax
letters themselves. This could be a clue to his motivations. If he wished to
scale up US military action against Iraq, he almost succeeded—many in
Washington tried hard to see Saddam Hussein’s hand in the attacks.
If he wished merely to make the US pour billions into biodefence, he did
succeed. And as a US bioweapons expert, he might already be reaping the
increased funding and prestige that now goes with the job.
That chilling possibility underscores the US’s dilemma. The attack showed how
badly the country needs to improve biodefence. Yet to do so, the US must boost
the very institutions that seemingly permitted this attack. That may help it
prepare for the next one. But it may not prevent it.
Is throwing money at biodefence the answer?
THE US is vastly increasing its biodefence research in the wake of the
anthrax attacks. But even though biosafety standards will be tightened up,
critics fear this explosion in research may only make another bioterrorist
strike more likely.
This week President Bush announced an $11 billion increase in
biodefence funding over the next two years. A lot of that will go into research.
A whopping $1.5 billion is earmarked for the National Institutes of
Health—five times its current biodefence budget.
The NIH money will pay for basic research into “select agents”—the buzz
phrase for the pathogens most likely to be turned into weapons, and for work on
improved diagnostics, drugs and vaccines. Top of the list come anthrax, plague,
smallpox, botulism and tularemia, a bacterial disease of rodents. The genetic
characteristics of many of these select agents are poorly understood, and most
have no vaccine.
But more research means that more of these organisms will exist in more labs,
and more people will know how to work with them. It’s a risky strategy when the
anthrax perpetrator is thought to be a US bioweapons insider. Richard Ebright, a
bacterial molecular biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, fears that
skyrocketing research could make bioweapons attacks more likely, not less.
Yet with such largesse on offer, researchers are stampeding to the trough.
“The increase in support has engendered a gold-rush atmosphere among
microbiologists and molecular biologists,” complains Ebright. At the height of
the anthrax scare last November, Nancy Connell of the Biodefense Initiative at
New Jersey Medical School in Newark got an average of five calls a day from
researchers keen to start work with select agents. Both scientists want a
moratorium on new permits for handling select agents, and stringent safety
procedures in place before anyone can work with them—even if it means
shutting down existing labs.
Suspicion that the anthrax attacker is an American scientist has already led
to a clampdown. US microbiologists, speaking off the record, tell of hordes of
government inspectors, from the FBI to the US Department of Agriculture,
descending on labs in the past few months, issuing subpoenas for lab records,
and demanding security improvements.
Researchers also face new legal controls. The USA Patriots Act passed in
November requires background checks for scientists working with a list of toxic
agents. Congress is finalising a Bioweapons Protection Act that will demand
increased security and containment, and the registration of labs, scientists,
and the genetic fingerprints of laboratory pathogens, to track any future
release.
These new precautions don’t come cheap. It can cost millions just to improve
containment. That could drive the research away from smaller university labs,
even though they tend to do the most innovative research, says Martin
Hugh-Jones, an anthrax expert at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. Soon
only the biggest labs may be able to afford the few experts in the area. Some
scientists are reportedly being offered six-figure salaries.
CONFUSION reigned after the FBI announced that the attacker had used the Ames
strain of anthrax. Some authorities said the Ames bug was a “laboratory
workhorse” used everywhere. Others disagreed. Some were sure the strain was
isolated in 1932, and used in US anthrax weapons before it stopped making them
in 1969. Yet army research publications said Ames was isolated in 1980.
The date of origin would reveal whether or not the anthrax was left over from
the old weapons programme. But even top experts contacted by New
Scientist couldn’t say for sure what it was.
Only last week, after rummaging through old records, did a sheepish US
Department of Agriculture finally confirm that the strain came from a cow in
Texas in 1981. It was called Ames because the US veterinary lab in that city was
the return address on the envelope used to post the sample to army scientists.
The inscription “10-32” meant “number 10 of 32 samples”—not October 1932
as some people thought. But whether it came from Texas or Iowa, the important
clue is that the attacker used the strain currently held at USAMRIID.
While this highlights the value of knowing where strains of pathogens come
from, the Ames saga also revealed that no one knows the home address of many
potential bioweapons. A massive effort to map the genetic variation of the
nastiest species is now gathering steam, starting with lab stocks of
smallpox.
