> 

>Jim Carlton
>Years Ago, The Military Sprayed Germs On U.S. Cities
>Sun Feb 24 01:09:52 2002
>209.214.19.83

>Years Ago, The Military Sprayed Germs On U.S. Cities
>by Jim Carlton
>Wall Street Journal
>Octor 22, 2001
>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."

>http://www.apfn.org/APFN/germs.htm