Bigger anthrax threat

By Rick Weiss

The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — The anthrax spores that contaminated the air in Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s office had been treated with a chemical additive so sophisticated that only three nations are believed capable of making it, sources said Wednesday.

The United States, the former Soviet Union and Iraq are the only three nations known to have developed the kind of additives that enable anthrax spores to remain suspended in the air, making them more easily inhaled and therefore more deadly, experts said Wednesday. Each nation used a different technique, suggesting that ongoing analyses may reveal more about the spores’ origin than did genetic analysis, which is largely complete but reportedly has done little to narrow the field.

Even identifying the kind of coating may not solve the crucial question of who is perpetrating the terror, because little is known about how secure the stores of the three countries’ stocks have been over the past few years.

Nonetheless, the conclusion that the spores were produced with military quality differs considerably from public comments made recently by officials close to the investigation, who have said the spores were not "weaponized" and were "garden variety."

Those descriptions may be technically true, several experts said, but they obscure the more important truth that the spores were treated with a sophisticated process, meaning the original source was almost certainly a state-sponsored laboratory.

The finding strongly suggests that the anthrax spores in the U.S. mail attacks were not produced in a university or makeshift laboratory or simply gathered from natural sources. But it does not answer the question of whether a state-sponsored laboratory supplied the spores directly to terrorists or simply lost control of some stocks in recent years.

The presence of the high-grade additive was confirmed for the first time Wednesday by a government source familiar with the ongoing studies, which are being conducted by scientists at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md. Other experts in anthrax weapons said they had no doubt that such an additive was present, based on the high dispersal rate from the letter to Daschle, D-S.D.

"The evidence is patent on its face," said Alan Zelicoff, a senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories’ Center for National Security and Arms Control. "The amount of energy needed to disperse the spores (by merely opening an envelope) was trivial, which is virtually diagnostic of achieving the appropriate coating."

David Franz, formerly of the Army Medical Research Institute and now at the Southern Research Institute in Birmingham, Ala., said, "In order for a formulation to do what the one in Daschle’s office appears to have done — be easily airborne — it would require special treatment."

Genetic testing of the spores found in Daschle’s office, at NBC offices in New York and in Florida found that the three samples were indistinguishable.

The ongoing Army Medical Research Institute studies on the spores used in the U.S. attacks involve examinations using conventional microscopes and scanning electron microscopes, along with complex chemical analyses that are difficult to conduct even when the bacteria in question are not dangerous. The analyses are far more difficult in this case, experts said, because anthrax spores must be studied in specially sealed laboratory enclosures to ensure that they do not escape.

Results of those tests have not been made public beyond a description of how small the spore particles were in the Daschle letter. That particle size, 1 1/2 to 3 microns in diameter, said Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., is extremely small — a first requirement for making weapons grade anthrax spores.

But more than that is needed to get anthrax spores to drift easily in the air and spread widely without settling quickly to the ground. That is because tiny particles tend to have electrostatic charges — the static electricity that can cause hair to extend skyward when rubbed against a balloon. Those charges make the tiniest particles clump together into heavier ones, which then settle to the ground.

One of the primary goals of bioweapons engineers since the 1960s was to figure out how to treat those tiny particles in ways that would neutralize the problematic charges. Properly processed, the tiny particles will remain separated from each other and fly up and outward with virtually no effort. An imperceptible wisp of a breeze can send them across a room.

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