The Soviet government claimed the deaths were caused by intestinal anthrax from tainted meat, a story some influential American scientists found believable. However, officials in the Carter administration suspected the outbreak was caused by an accidental release of anthrax spores from a suspected Soviet biological weapons facility located in the city.
The US believed that the Soviet Union was violating the Biological Weapons Convention signed in 1972 and made their suspicions public. But the Soviets denied any activities relating to biological weapons and at numerous international conferences tried to prove their contaminated meat story.
It wasn't until thirteen years later - 1992- that President Boris Yeltsin admitted, without going into details, that the anthrax outbreak was the result of military activity at the facility. During those thirteen years, while an intense debate raged within the international scientific and intelligence communities on whether the Russians were telling the truth, the Soviet Union continued its offensive biological warfare program unabated.
Around the time Yeltsin admitted the military facility was responsible for the incident, Russia allowed a team of Western scientists to go to Sverdlovsk to investigate the outbreak. The team visited Sverdlovsk in June 1992 and August 1993 and included Professor Matt Meselson.
Although the KGB had confiscated hospital and other records after the incident, the Western scientists were able to track where all the victims had been at the time of the anthrax release. Their results showed that on the day of the incident all the victims were clustered along a straight line downwind from the military facility. Livestock in the same area also died of anthrax.
After completing their investigation, the team concluded the outbreak was caused by a release of an aerosol of anthrax pathogen at the military facility. But they were unable to determine what caused the release or what specific activities were conducted at the facility.
According to FRONTLINE's interview with Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, former first deputy chief for Biopreparat (the civilian part of the Soviet biological weapons program), the anthrax airborne leak had been caused by workers at the military facility who forgot to replace a filter in an exhaust system. The mistake was realized shortly after, but by then some anthrax spores were released.
Alibekov says if the wind had been in the opposite direction that day--toward the city of Sverdlovsk--the death rate could have been in the hundreds of thousands. To this day, Western inspectors have not been allowed to visit this military facility.
(Blogger's Notes: Like Chinese Communists today with the horrible escape of deadly Wuhan Corona Virus the Russian Communists lied through their teeth and covered up the 1979 deadly leak of Antharx bio-weapon and the death of their own people, for more than 13 years. Like Russian Communists before them the Chinese Communist Party will never admit the true origin - the escape of Wuhan Virus from the Wuhan PLA Lab - till that evil party eventually collapses like the Soviet Union.)
In the spring of 1979, the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk was covered in a disastrous plume of anthrax spores. The leak came from a secret bioweapons facility that produced anthrax on an industrial scale.
The anthrax spores spread at least 50 kilometers from the research complex and killed about 100 people. It was covered up by the Soviet government for years because they were in violation of international agreement to ban offensive bioweapons research.
Now, researchers have found samples from that anthrax leak and tested it with modern high-throughput whole genome sequences and uncovered tantalizing genomic clues into that bioweapons research.
What is anthrax?
Anthrax is a disease that can cause black ulcers on the skin, stomach pains, fever, vomiting, and potentially kill infected people. It is caused by the bacteria Bacillus anthracis that can be found in soil all over the world and sometimes infect animals such as cows and sheep. Humans can become sick if they came into contact with infected animals or animal products, but it generally does not spread between humans.
Out in nature, the bacteria that causes anthrax can create spores, which are hardened structure that works as a resting state for bacteria until the conditions outside improve. When humans get exposed to anthrax spores, the bacteria starts to grow and multiply, eventually producing toxins and causing illness. Humans can get exposed through the skin, through breathing, through the gut or from injection.
What are bioweapons?
A bioweapon, or biological weapon of mass destruction, is usually a human pathogen that can be grown in bulk, stockpiled and used against human targets in warfare. Because the microorganisms that cause harmful and deadly human infectious diseases are not visible to most humans in the same way that many conventional weapons are, it adds an additional level of fear to the mix.
There is also a specific time period between the time the bioweapon is deployed and people become infected until symptoms start to appear (called incubation time), the perpetrators can escape unnoticed if the security services are not on top of their game.
Bioweapons can be made by isolating and growing harmful human pathogens and making stockpiles ready to be used, but there is an even darker side to bioweapons. It is that they can be genetically modified by adding in extra genetic material that makes them more durable, provide additional virulence or become resistant to antibiotics. The fact that anthrax can make spores make them resistant to the environment and can be spread as aerosols.
Anthrax was most recently used as a bioweapon during the 2001 anthrax attacks (also known as Amerithrax) where several letters containing Anthrax spores were sent to different people around the United States, killing five people and harming 17 others.
The FBI suspected Bruce Edwards Ivins, a researcher at a lab working on defense against biological weapons at Fort Detrick in Maryland. He later committed suicide and the FBI investigation has been strongly criticized in a report by the National Academy of Sciences because the investigation was lacking in scientific merits.
Inside the Soviet bioweapons program
The Soviet biological weapons program out of the Biopreparat agency engaged in research and production of weaponized forms of dangerous human pathogens such as smallpox and anthrax. Because the Soviet Union had signed the Biological Weapons Convention (1972) that banned research into the offensive use of bioweapons, this research constituted a breach of that convention.
Due to political pressure from the U. S and U. K, the Soviets agreed to inspections in the early 90s, but they were largely met with cleaned up facilities and denial from official sources. One crucial event that occurred during the Soviet biological weapons program happened in the spring of 1979 at the city of Yekaterinburg (then called Sverdlovsk).
Although covered up by the Soviet government for years, it was a research laboratory that worked on producing anthrax for as an offensive bioweapon. The event involved an accidental leak of a plume of anthrax spores from the facility that, together with poor emergency management, lead to the deaths of about 100 people (some at least 4 kilometers from the building complex).
What did the scientists uncover about the Sverdlovsk anthrax release?
Historical information about this event, as well as results conclusion from genomic research on those anthrax samples are discussed in the paper A Bacillus anthracis Genome Sequence from the Sverdlovsk 1979 Autopsy Specimens written by Sahl and colleagues and published in the journal mBio in 2016.
Apparently, the leak resulted of failed maintenance of safety air at a spore production facility called Compound 19. Confirmed anthrax cases were thought to extend several kilometers for humans and about 50 kilometers from farm animals. Early PCR analysis confirmed anthrax and some samples from human autopsies were fixed with formalin and stored.
Now, these researchers leveraged high-throughput genome sequencing tools to get a good draft genome of the anthrax strain that infected these victims. Their phylogenetic analysis placed it among other Asian strains and there was no evidence of genetic engineering or selection experiments to breed antibiotic resistance.
