Pugwash Review
by Martin Kaplan

Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak



by Jeanne Guillemin

©1999 University of California Press

IN early 1980 the press in Western countries reported that a fatal epidemic of anthrax had occurred in Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) in the Soviet Union. Articles were published in Soviet medical and veterinary journals citing an anthrax outbreak among livestock south of Sverdlovsk city and that people had become infected after eating contaminated meat from these animals. Subsequently, an international debate developed as to whether the epidemic was a natural outbreak or a laboratory accident and, if the latter, whether it represented a violation of the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 (BWC) which the Soviet Union had signed and ratified.

Matthew Meselson, Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University since 1961, has been an active participant in the series of over 40 Pugwash Workshops on Chemical and Biological Weapons (CBW). In the mid-1980s he renewed previously unsuccessful efforts to bring independent scientists to Sverdlovsk to investigate the epidemic. In 1988 he succeeded in arranging for Soviet physicians involved in the epidemic to visit the USA to give their version of the outbreak. Their "contaminated meat" account seemed plausible to Meselson and his colleagues, but they felt that additional scientific evidence was needed. After numerous attempts, in 1992 Meselson finally obtained an invitation to go to Sverdlovsk with a team of experts.

Jeanne Guillemin, Professor of Sociology at Boston College, and also Meselson's wife, was a member of that team, in charge of interviews with the families of victims. She has now written a book drawing on field notes which she kept during the project. Her account will no doubt occupy a high rank in BW literature for its authenticity and insights as it is a meticulous report of the effects on a community exposed to the microbe anthrax.

In the course of her detailed description of the suffering and distress still evident some 13 years after the 1979 event, Dr. Guillemin's empathy with her subjects is moving. Her account is also greatly enriched by her references to Russian history and personalities taking into account both the great toll in human rights, as well as the social benefits obtained during the communist regime.

As Guillemin's account proceeds there is a dramatic build-up of evidence proving the thesis that a mishap at the military laboratory in Sverdlovsk on 2 April 1979 was the origin of the epidemic and resulted in 66 documented deaths, 11 cases of severe illness, and the infection of livestock up to 50 kilometers from the aerosol source, The thesis is buttressed by a paper published in Science in 1994 (vol. 266, pages 1202-1208) by Meselson, Guillemin and other colleagues on the team. This article, which ranks as a classic in epidemiology, relied primarily on Guillemin's interviews—which located the victims just prior to the outbreak—to identify the military base as the source of the anthrax emission. Anthrax reveals the scientific process that went into that article and also the expertise and tenacity required by the team of private citizens to reconstruct the highly-politicized event.

Guillemin's summing up at the end of the book merits careful study. It includes considerations of social and political dilemmas faced by governments and the public at large from the threat of BW by states and terrorists. It is thought-provoking and outlines reasoned action. It should serve as an antidote to the public and official hysteria and inappropriate or ineffective measures which could arise from exaggerated accounts and reactions to the dangers involved.