Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Anthrax ROCKS
I received the following e-mail from a Razzyphile the other day:
Hey, Razzy
Thank you for the useless bullshit. You are definitely fulfilling a societal need.
I was hoping you could post about the anthrax dude who recently killed himself. You are an expert in the field and we razzyphiles would like to hear from you anything germane to our greater understanding of the entire incident.
PS great rack
I'm a recent law school grad but not admitted so I can't help legally yet.
I am always happy to accommodate requests to drop some science for an interested Razzyphile, particularly one who simultaneously compliments my tits, declares the demand for useless bullshit a "societal need," and might be able to potentially join my crack pro bono legal team of criminal defense and bankruptcy attorneys once he passes the bar exam. I'm also always especially happy to discuss this sexy Gram-positive spore-forming facultative anaerobe:
I've had a real scientific hard-on for Bacillus anthracis since I started studying microbiology. By all accounts, it's a hardy little survivor, which is what makes it a successful pathogen and a relatively efficient biological weapon. The above picture (which looks like a colored transmission electron micrograph) depicts B. anthracis in a state called vegetative growth, which is the type of growth most people imagine bacteria do in an Erlenmeyer flask or a petri dish of culture media. They divide by binary fission until they run out of nutrients or growth conditions become otherwise unfavorable. Most bacteria, like E. coli or Salmonella species, will proceed to die or at least stop dividing under conditions of nutrient deprivation, but B. anthracis can do something special. It can sporulate, meaning it changes into a dormant spore form, until it is again exposed to more favorable growth conditions. This is equivalent to watching TV and taking a nap on the couch when nothing good is on, to conserve your strength and attention for when something awesome like "I Love Money" or a rerun of Red Dawn merits waking up.
B. anthracis spores are extremely durable and can remain viable for decades in the soil, which is why livestock are most often afflicted with anthrax. The spores get from the earth into grazing animals' hair and basically hang out there. If they get into vulnerable areas of skin (via a cut or a mucosal surface like the eye), they germinate, and result in cutaneous anthrax. Generally the humans that get this are farmers, herders, slaughterhouse employees, and other people working with livestock. In both animals and humans, cutaneous anthrax presents as an ulcerating lesion that is usually pretty gross, but usually treatable with antibiotics and not fatal.
It's much more serious when the spores are inhaled and germinate in the lungs. Prior to the Cold War era of state-sponsored bioweapons programs, pulmonary anthrax was known as "Woolsorter's Disease," because it typically affected people who worked in places where animal hides were processed and resulted in high concentrations of airborne spores. However, when World War II came around, a number of countries (including the great U.S. of A., Great Britain, and the Soviet Union) decided to test the feasibility of using aerosolized anthrax spores as a biological weapon. They are naturally a great bioweapon because not only are the spores incredibly hardy, but pulmonary anthrax is not transmissible from person-to-person. Therefore, you can target an enemy efficiently without worrying about causing an epidemic. However, nobody ever used anthrax as a weapon in an actual war, partly because of the lasting effects. Gruinard Island, off the Scottish coast, was used by British scientists to test their anthrax bombs in the hopes of using them against Germany. They stopped developing anthrax as a weapon when they concluded that, while effective at killing their test sheep, the spores were so durable that they would render any German city attacked this way uninhabitable for years afterward. In fact, Gruinard Island was so heavily contaminated that it was quarantined for almost 50 years after these tests, until the Brits got sick of going back to test it all the time and bombed the whole place with 280 metric tons of formaldehyde.
The major world powers then signed a treaty in 1972 pledging not to develop new biological or chemical weapons. Apart from an incident in the Russian city of Sverdlovsk in 1979 when a number of factory workers across the street from a "vaccine plant" died from pulmonary anthrax (the Kremlin attributed the incident to contaminated meat, while Soviet defectors involved in the Soviet bioweapons program attributed it to a filter being left off an exhaust vent), no government has openly developed anthrax as a biological weapon. However, anthrax is still studied from both a basic research and a biodefense perspective, and there are certainly cultures of highly virulent B. anthracis growing in many research facilities all over the world.
For anyone with a basic knowledge of microbiological technique, weaponized anthrax is easy to make. In fact, if you can make homebrewed beer, you can make an anthrax weapon. Anthrax is not like Ebola virus, which is hard to get, harder to culture, and almost impossible to deliver to the intended targets. If you wanted to attack someone with Ebola, you'd have to go to Africa in the midst of an Ebola outbreak, somehow smuggle viable samples of virus through customs (and "samples" in this case would probably consist of bloody vomit or shit from an Ebola patient on ice), find a bunch of monkeys to covertly infect to grow more virus, and try to attack and inject infected tissues from these monkeys into my unfortunate victims since most strains of Ebola (at least the ones that infect humans) don't appear to be airborne. Since Ebola is a virus, it needs a host cell to grow in, and the virus particles alone are not stable for long at room temperature or when exposed to UV radiation (ie: sunlight). You can't just make some powdered Ebola and spray it all over people, and someone is bound to notice if you're running around attacking people with a syringe. There's about fifty ways that such a scheme would fail, and even if you somehow did manage to make some homegrown Ebola, it would be pretty fucking difficult to infect many people before your evil plot was discovered.
Anthrax is much easier to make. I could go dig up soil from a cow pasture in Oklahoma, culture anthrax bacilli from that, grow them in a fermentation tank which can be constructed from materials at my local hardware store, dry the culture, chop it into powder, and mail it to whoever I wanted. Even worse, pulmonary anthrax is usually deadly, because the initial symptoms aren't much different than a chest cold. Unlike other bacteria that cause pneumonia by growing to the point of taking over the lungs, pulmonary anthrax causes respiratory failure via a toxin the bacteria secrete. By the time it becomes apparent that a patient has pulmonary anthrax versus a more common respiratory pathogen, even getting rid of the bacteria with antibiotics doesn't get rid of the toxin, and then it's usually too late. Therefore, it's quite easy for someone with a rudimentary knowledge of microbiology to make a deadly, easily transportable terrorist weapon. Fortunately, most scientists (including myself) aren't looking to break into the bioterrorism business, and have serious ethical problems with biological weapons. Unfortunately, there are some who do not fit that description, which is where the recently suicide-d Dr. Bruce Ivins comes in.
In the wake of those anthrax mail attacks in 2001, the federal government obviously put a lot of effort into determining where that anthrax came from. Like people or any other living organism, anthrax from a lab is genetically distinct from anthrax in a podunk cow pasture somewhere, so the government was able to determine that it came from a virulent lab strain. In fact, it came from a strain that our own government uses to develop anthrax vaccines. That's why the government fucked up royally by running a colossally inept investigation of Dr. Steven Hatfill, the wrong anthrax scientist, who just collected a $5 million settlement from the federal government for the ruin it wrought on his career and his not-a-terrorist reputation.
As it turns out, it was more likely Dr. Bruce Ivins, who killed himself last week when he discovered that he was going to be indicted on capital murder charges for being the actual anthrax mailer. Dr. Ivins was involved in all sorts of sketchy activity, including renting post office boxes under assumed names, using his lab after-hours (although as a grad student, that seems like a perfectly normal workday in the slave labor culture of academic research), having a number of unreported anthrax spills, threatening to kill co-workers, frightening his shrink into getting a restraining order against him, and being strangely obsessed with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority at Princeton. He was also apparently a loner and a dick.
While anyone has reason to be skeptical of the FBI's largely circumstantial case against the late Dr. Ivins given their total shitshow of an investigation into the now-exonerated Dr. Hatfill, I can state from personal experience that science has been known to harbor some disturbed people that remind me of Dr. Ivins. Without specifically referring to anyone in particular, a person with a need to dominate, threaten, and harass his colleagues, has a troublesome and obsessive relationship with women, does not respond to reprimands or psychological treatment, and takes no personal responsibility for his actions is not unprecedented in the field of microbiology. Unfortunately, these kinds of mentally unstable people can simultaneously be good enough at their jobs to get access to dangerous pathogens, and sometimes the underlying craziness isn't recognized until it's too late.
Even worse, this personality type can sometimes combine the monstrous need to kill innocent people via anthrax with a desire for personal gain. Because these people are Ph.D scientists, they are obviously intelligent, and can sometimes engineer a situation to benefit financially from their own reprehensible crimes. For example, a person might be able to get away with being a scary, abusive, potentially violent asshole by threatening lawsuits or otherwise manipulating the legal system to get what they want along with a substantial cash award. In Dr. Ivins's case, his numerous patent claims over anthrax vaccine technology would provide a significant financial motive to create a nationwide panic about attacks with weaponized anthrax. Currently, the anthrax vaccine approved for use in the U.S. is primarily reserved for military personnel and the odd first-responder. If everyone in the country suddenly became hysterical over the prospect of a large-scale anthrax attack, the demand for a vaccine would increase logarithmically. Dr. Ivins stood to make millions of dollars personally from this kind of nationwide terror, and that can only be icing on the cake for acting out on his reprehensible misanthropic impulses.
Now, many people are probably wondering whether or not they should be afraid of future anthrax attacks since it's so easy to grow and distribute as a lethal bioweapon. I would say no. Sure, the possibility exists. So does the possibility of a flu pandemic as serious as the Spanish flu of 1918 that killed as many as 100 million people by some estimations. So does the possibility of some terrorist getting their hands on one of the few poorly secured smallpox samples, of an airborne strain of Ebola emerging, of all bacteria developing multiple antibiotic resistance, and so on. The Russians alone have a whole arsenal of Cold War-era biological weapons that could be procured on the black market and released, but I'm not laying awake worrying about dying from a terrorist attack of weaponized Soviet tularemia or glanders. The microbiological world is full of nasty (and fascinating) pathogens, and there are plenty of nasty human beings who would gladly facilitate their assault on us. However, I find it more productive to worry about the infectious problems we already have to contend with than the ones that may or may not decimate our civilization. I think it's much more practical and sensible to worry about getting HIV when I have incautious drunk sex with a fellow New York City resident than to fret that there's a slight chance some lunatic spiked my cable bill with anthrax spores. Hell, I'm even more worried that I might get herpes! I dodged that bullet one time when I ALMOST had unprotected sex with a guy who then advised me that he had it (because he is a decent and ENTIRELY admirable human being), and 20% of adults have the herp. As a microbiologist, I'd advise you all to think more about the scourges we already face than the hypothetical ones that might be.
Labels: correspondence, crime and punishment, epidemic geekery, nerd alert, Razzyphiles, science, terror, viruses rule
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I think reading your blog provides more education than my damn university; this entry only goes to show that more time spend on your site is absolutely necessary.
Anthrax does indeed rock, they have some good fucking albums, especially from the 80's era. Scott Ian is a wuss though and can be a real asshole to the others in the band. I will never figure out why this website does not have a massive slew of death metal freaks that are dedicated Razzyphiles, after all, she's a virologist and talks about shit like anthrax and ebola and pathogens all the time, the shit that these dudes love. I mean, there is at least 1 band with the name of every virus that Razzy studies in the world and those pics that she shows of them would make great CD covers for these bands. Fuck, they could get ideas for songs and shit just by reading what she says here about that stuff , so I am surprised that she is not considered a death metal queen by these types. Plus, she is of Norwegian descent, a country that is considered part of the Holy Land in those circles.
Master Underground is a creepy douchebag. I heard that lives with his mom.
# posted by 
: 8/07/2008 11:23 AM
: 8/07/2008 11:23 AM
Master Underground is a creepy douchebag. I heard that lives with his mom.
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# posted by : 8/07/2008 11:23 AM
: 8/07/2008 11:23 AM Links to this post:
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