Biohazard

No one wanted to set off a panic or to alert outsiders. Sverdlovsk residents were informed that the deaths were caused by a truckload of contaminated meat sold on the black market. Printed fliers advised people to stay away from "unofficial" food vendors. More than one hundred stray dogs were rounded up and killed, on the grounds that they represented a danger to public health after having been seen scavenging near markets where the meat was sold. Meanwhile, military sentries were posted in the immediate neighborhood of the plant to keep intruders away, and KGB officers pretending to be doctors visited the homes of victims' families with falsified death certificates.

Whether residents suspected the truth or not, military and KGB control ensured that the city remained orderly. A Northwestern University physics professor named Donald E. Ellis, who was in Sverdlovsk at the time on an exchange program, reported that he noticed nothing unusual in the city. "I don't exclude the possibility that something may have occurred," he told The New York Times years later, "but I think either I or my wife would have sensed some effort to protect us from it. We… were not aware of any restrictions."

Residents had been living behind a thick veil of security for decades. Since World War II, Sverdlovsk, renamed after an early Bolshevik leader, had been the heart of the Soviet military-industrial complex, turning out tanks, nuclear rockets, and other armaments as well as biological weapons. In 1958, a major nuclear accident occurred at another site in the region, near the city of Chelyabinsk. The exact details of what happened are hazy, but reports from both Western and Communist sources indicate that a military reactor was damaged, resulting in the spread of radioactive dust over several thousand square kilometers. Twelve villages

were evacuated.

The determination with which Soviet officials set about concealing the Sverdlovsk leak from their own people as well as the world was, under the circumstances, not surprising. The truth would have severely embarrassed the nation's leaders, many of whom were not even aware that biological arms production was under way, and caused an international crisis. It wasn't at first clear that the coverup would succeed. Army commanders worried that they might not be able to contain the disaster.

"We couldn't understand why people continued to die," a general who was there told me much later. "We assumed that this was a quick, one-time exposure and that our mopping-up would be completed in a few days, but there were deaths for a month and a half after the release."

The coverup was responsible for turning what began as a medical emergency into a small epidemic.

The local Communist Party boss, who was apparently told that there had been a leak of hazardous material from the plant, ordered city workers to scrub and trim trees, spray roads, and hose down roofs. This spread the spores further through "secondary aerosols" — spores that had settled after the initial release and were stirred up again by the cleanup blitz. Anthrax dust drifted through the city, and new victims arrived at the hospitals with black ulcerous swellings on their skin.

The cutaneous form of anthrax, contracted when spores enter the body through a cut or abrasion on the surface of the skin, occurs naturally in rural areas around the world, especially those with large herds of domestic cattle, sheep, and goats. It is the most common form of anthrax and is rarely lethal when treated with antibiotics such as penicillin. Russians refer to it as the "Siberian ulcer," as it manifests itself through the formation of small and localized lesions on the surface of the skin. An outbreak of cutaneous anthrax in the region was credible, but it wouldn't explain why so many factory workers, who could have had no contact with animals, were suddenly sick, or why so many died.

Anthrax spores can survive for years — even decades — in a dormant state. Animals will become infected while foraging for food. The spores germinate in a matter of hours and multiply in their hosts, returning to spore form when they die or on contact with oxygen. Men and women who work with infected animals — butchers, tanners, farmers, and workers in textile mills — become infected in turn through abrasions, by inhaling spores or drinking contaminated water, or, in rare cases, by eating contaminated meat. Soviet officials fell back on the claim that the disease was caused by contaminated meat. Doctors displayed photos that suggested victims had contracted intestinal anthrax, by far the rarest form of the disease (it accounts for fewer than 1 percent of all cases). But officials could not hide the presence of pulmonary or inhalational anthrax, the most lethal of all.