Years Ago, The Military Sprayed Germs On U.S. Cities

[Oliver Crangle]

Years Ago, The Military Sprayed Germs On U.S. Cities

 

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

[R. LaCasse]

"Gov'ts" don't give a shit about you, your just tax (666) paying
cattle and when that doesn't provide enough eccentric satisfaction to
them, they blow up things like Pearl Harbor, WTC, and all those other so
called "Foreign" Terrorist attacks....and it goes on and on to unlimited
deviations, till they turn to square one with a "blackout" time lapse for
personal psych outs to their guilt.

THEY did that Streptococcus A "flesh eating disease" thing about
25 years ago at Tattum Creek, which left Mr. Tattum without a face, yes,
upper jaw, well it looked like a grizzly had bitten his face off.
His wife was not affected, but the Viral Streptococcus A germ
found itself to all sorts of unlikely places like Ontario and B. Columbia,
which may be a revelation in Demo/Geographic transcendental duct capacity
over the blazee version of here and there......

We All Know.......

Bob