Biohazard

The most severe form of the disease is pneumonic plague. Passed from one person to another by as little as a sneeze or cough, the bacteria invade the bronchial system and produce a fatal attack of pneumonia as fluid fills up the lungs, cutting off the supply of oxygen to distant organs. The incubation period for pneumonic plague is short — rarely more than a few days. The symptoms are sudden and often difficult to distinguish from other infectious diseases. An incorrect or late diagnosis can be fatal.

As the plague bacteria are attacked by the body's immune protection system, they release a potent toxin that leads to further collapse of the circulatory system. Death is invariably painful. Victims of pneumonic plague will succumb within eighteen hours of the toxin's release, sometimes going into convulsions and delirium and usually lapsing into a coma toward the end.

In the twentieth century, improvements in urban sanitation and developments in medicine have made outbreaks of plague rare— fewer than two thousand cases are reported on average every year. hut the disease continues to surface in rural areas of the western United States — Texas, California, and the Sierra Nevada, where prairie dogs and chipmunks carry the disease. Recent outbreaks have been reported in human populations in India, Africa, South Asia, and southeastern Europe. The disease even struck down U.S. troops in Vietnam.

Since 1948 the most effective treatment against plague has been streptomycin, an antibiotic administered orally or intravenously. Tetracycline, gentamicin, and doxycycline have also been used successfully. The first plague vaccine was developed by a Russian physician, Waldemar M. W. Haffkine, in 1897, during the Hong Kong pandemic. Several improved vaccines have been developed since then, but they are effective only against bubonic plague. Boosters must be taken every six months. Degrees of immunization vary from person to person, and adverse reactions increase with the frequency of vaccinations.

The earliest recorded use of Y. pestis in war was in the fourteenth century, when a Tatar army conquered Kaffa, in present-day Crimea, by catapulting the bodies of plague victims over the walls of the town. During World War II, leaders of the Japanese bacteriological warfare program turned to plague because an attack could be concealed as a natural outbreak. But there were drawbacks: when they tried to drop bombs filled with plague from aircraft, the explosion killed the bacteria. The commanders finally settled on a more effective method of delivery: they blanketed the target area with billions of plague-infected fleas.

Americans tried to develop a plague weapon but found that its virulence deteriorated quickly. The bacteria lost virulence so rapidly — sometimes in less than thirty minutes — that aerosols were useless. U.S. bioweaponeers eventually lost interest, but we persevered. Plague can be grown easily in a wide range of temperatures and media, and we eventually developed a plague weapon capable of surviving in an aerosol while maintaining its killing capacity. In the city of Kirov, we maintained a quota of twenty tons of plague in our arsenals every year.

The success of the Bonfire project raised our plague work to a new level. Within the next few months, scientists at Obolensk successfully transferred the gene for myelin toxin to Yersinia pestis. A toxin-plague weapon was never produced before the Soviet Union collapsed, but the success of this experiment set the stage for further research on bacteria-toxin combinations. Soon, scientists were studying the feasibility of inserting the genes for botulinum, the most lethal naturally occurring toxin, into bacteria.

In other circumstances, the discovery by Russian scientists that human regulatory peptides could be reproduced in the lab might have been shared widely, even welcomed as a contribution to our understanding of neurological disease. Instead, it was classified top secret and concealed from the world.

The final speaker at the conference was Urakov. As he approached the microphone to deliver his closing remarks, he could barely contain his pride.

"We have overachieved, as usual," he said.

No one could argue with him. Obolensk by then covered so much ground that workers had to take a bus from one section to another. At the time of the conference, it housed about four thousand scientists and technicians. The facility's annual budget of nearly $10 million paid for the purchase of expensive Western equipment — electron microscopes, chromatography devices, high-grade centrifuges, laser analysis machines.

The myelin toxin report was the last in a series of successes reported that day. Another team had developed a genetically altered strain of anthrax resistant to five antibiotics. And there was a new drug-resistant strain of glanders.

Yet Urakov still wasn't satisfied.