Microbes and Mock Attacks - 51 Years Ago, Military Sprayed Germs on U.S. Cities

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Of Microbes and Mock Attacks -

51 Years Ago, The Military

Sprayed Germs on U.S. Cities

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Of Microbes and Mock Attacks -

51 Years Ago, The Military

Sprayed Germs on U.S. Cities

By Jim Carlton

Wall Street Journal

10-26-1

 

SAN FRANCISCO - Fifty-one years ago, Edward J. Nevin checked into a San

Francisco hospital, complaining of chills, fever and general malaise. Three

weeks later, the 75-year-old retired pipe fitter was dead, the victim of

what doctors said was an infection of the bacterium Serratia marcescens.

 

Decades later, Mr. Nevin's family learned what they believe was the cause of

the infection, linked at the time to the hospitalizations of 10 other

patients. In Senate subcommittee hearings in 1977, the U.S. Army revealed

that weeks before Mr. Nevin sickened and died, the Army had staged a mock

biological attack on San Francisco, secretly spraying the city with Serratia

and other agents thought to be harmless.

 

The goal: to see what might happen in a real germ-warfare attack. The

experiment, which involved blasting a bacterial fog over the entire

49-square-mile city from a Navy vessel offshore, was recorded with clinical

nonchalance: " It was noted that a successful BW [biological warfare] attack

on this area can be launched from the sea, and that effective dosages can be

produced over relatively large areas, " the Army wrote in its 1951 classified

report on the experiment.

 

Now, with anthrax in the mail and fear mounting of further biological

attacks, researchers are again looking back at the only other time this

country faced the perils of germ warfare - albeit self-inflicted. In fact,

much of what the Pentagon knows about the effects of bacterial attacks on

cities came from those secret tests conducted on San Francisco and other

American cities from the 1940s through the 1960s, experts say.

 

" We learned a lot about how vulnerable we are to biological attack from

those tests, " says Leonard Cole, adjunct professor of political science at

Rutgers University in New Jersey and author of several books on

bioterrorism. " I'm sure that's one reason crop dusters were grounded after

Sept. 11: The military knows how easy it is to disperse organisms that can

affect people over huge areas. "

 

In other tests in the 1950s, Army researchers dispersed Serratia on Panama

City, Fla., and Key West, Fla., with no known illnesses resulting. They also

released fluorescent compounds over Minnesota and other Midwestern states to

see how far they would spread in the atmosphere. The particles of

zinc-cadmium-sulfide - now a known cancer-causing agent - were detected more

than 1,000 miles away in New York state, the Army told the Senate hearings,

though no illnesses were ever attributed to them as a result.

 

Another bacterium, Bacillus globigii, never shown to be harmful to people,

was released in San Francisco, while still others were tested on unwitting

residents in New York, Washington, D.C., and along the Pennsylvania

Turnpike, among other places, according to Army reports released during the

1977 hearings.

 

In New York, military researchers in 1966 spread Bacillus subtilis variant

Niger, also believed to be harmless, in the subway system by dropping

lightbulbs filled with the bacteria onto tracks in stations in midtown

Manhattan. The bacteria were carried for miles throughout the subway system,

leading Army officials to conclude in a January 1968 report: " Similar covert

attacks with a pathogenic [disease-causing] agent during peak traffic

periods could be expected to expose large numbers of people to infection and

subsequent illness or death. "

 

Army officials also found widespread dispersal of bacteria in a May 1965

secret release of Bacillus globigii at Washington's National Airport and its

Greyhound bus terminal, according to military reports released a few years

after the Senate hearings. More than 130 passengers who had been exposed to

the bacteria traveling to 39 cities in seven states in the two weeks

following the mock attack.

 

The Army kept the biological-warfare tests secret until word of them was

leaked to the press in the 1970s. Between 1949 and 1969, when President

Nixon ordered the Pentagon's biological weapons destroyed, open-air tests of

biological agents were conducted 239 times, according to the Army's

testimony in 1977 before the Senate's subcommittee on health. In 80 of those

experiments, the Army said it used live bacteria that its researchers at the

time thought were harmless, such as the Serratia that was showered on San

Francisco. In the others, it used inert chemicals to simulate bacteria.

 

Several medical experts have since claimed that an untold number of people

may have gotten sick as a result of the germ tests. These researchers say

even benign agents can mutate into unpredictable pathogens once exposed to

the elements.

 

" The possibility cannot be ruled out that peculiarities in wind conditions

or ventilation systems in buildings might concentrate organisms, exposing

people to high doses of bacteria, " testified Stephen Weitzman of the State

University of New York, in the 1977 Senate hearings.

 

For its part, the Army justified its experiments by noting concerns during

World War II that U.S. cities might come under biological attack. To prepare

a response, the Army said, it had to test microbes on populated areas to

learn how bacteria disperse.

 

" Release in and near cities, in real-world circumstances, were considered

essential to the program, because the effect of a built-up area on a

biological agent cloud was unknown, " Edward A. Miller, the Army's secretary

for research and development at the time, told the subcommittee.

 

But in at least one case - the bacterial fogging of San Francisco - the

research may have gone awry. Between Sept. 20 and Sept. 27 of 1950, a Navy

mine-laying vessel cruised the San Francisco coast, spraying an aerosol

cocktail of Serratia and Bacillus microbes - all believed to be safe - over

the famously foggy city from giant hoses on deck, according to declassified

Army reports. According to lawyers who have reviewed the reports,

researchers added fluorescent particles of zinc-cadmium-sulfide to better

measure the impact. Based on results from monitoring equipment at 43

locations around the city, the Army determined that San Francisco had

received enough of a dose for nearly all of the city's 800,000 residents to

inhale at least 5,000 of the particles.

 

Two weeks after the spraying, on Oct. 11, 1950, Mr. Nevin checked in to the

Stanford Hospital in San Francisco with fever and other symptoms. Ten other

men and women checked in to the same hospital - which has since been

relocated to Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. - with similar

complaints. Doctors noticed that all 11 had the same malady: a pneumonia

caused by exposure to bacteria believed to be Serratia marcescens. Mr. Nevin

died three weeks later. The others recovered. Doctors were so surprised by

the outbreak that they reported it in a medical journal, oblivious at the

time to the secret germ test.

 

After the Army disclosed the tests nearly three decades later, Mr. Nevin's

surviving family members filed suit against the federal government, alleging

negligence. " My grandfather wouldn't have died except for that, and it left

my grandmother to go broke trying to pay his medical bills, " says Mr.

Nevin's grandson, Edward J. Nevin III, a San Francisco attorney who filed

the case in U.S. District Court here.

 

Army officials noted the pneumonia outbreak in their 1977 Senate testimony

but said any link to their experiments was totally coincidental. No other

hospitals reported similar outbreaks, the Army pointed out, and all 11

victims had urinary-tract infections following medical procedures,

suggesting that the source of their infections lay inside the hospital.

 

The Nevin family appealed the suit all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court,

which declined to overturn lower court judgments upholding the government's

immunity from lawsuits.

 

Today, the U.S. military is again patrolling San Francisco's coastline,

guarding against someone who might try to copy the Army tests of half a

century ago. Local officials say such an attack is unlikely, given the

logistical problems of blasting the city without Navy ships.

 

Partly as a result of Mr. Nevin's death, says Lucien Canton, director of San

Francisco's emergency services, " one thing we now know is that it takes an

awful lot of stuff to produce casualties, especially in a place like San

Francisco that always has a stiff breeze. "

 

Copyright 2001 Wall Street Journal

 

 

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