There are many ways to die, and the allied troops in Saudi Arabia have had four months to ponder them all. For most, the nightmare scenario isn’t a conventional bomb, or even fissioning uranium, though these are indisputably the most lethal weapons. It is chemical and germ warfare. Americans know that Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons; he used them against Iran during the eight-year war. And Western intelligence agencies agreed in mid-September that Iraq has the capacity to load microbe-filled warheads onto extended-range Scud missiles. But last week these theoretical threats suddenly became as real to the soldiers as a needle in the rump. In the next few weeks, the Pentagon will begin vaccinating American troops–and the British will do the same–against agents of biological warfare.
That decision has more to do with polities than medicine. For openers, the United States does not have nearly enough vaccine for its own troops, let alone those of its allies (NEWSWEEK, Dec. 31). Also, it takes three doses of anthrax vaccine, for example, spread evenly over 29 days, to confer immunity. Researchers disagree about how long afterward the body builds up full immunity. Arnold Kaufmann, an anthrax expert at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, says there have been no reported cases of anthrax in someone who has had all three shots; others believe full immunity could take months. And while the vaccine has proved effective against anthrax microbes that come in contact with the skin, there are questions about its efficacy against inhaled bacteria. But the military is going ahead with the inoculations anyway: germ warfare so terrifies the troops that officers think their soldiers might panic if they face Iraqi fire without having been vaccinated.
The focus is on anthrax because other viruses and bacteria make poor weapons. Plague and typhus are too unstable to be stored and packed into a warhead; cholera can be spread only through food and water. Western analysts believe that Iraq does not possess the capability to put botulin toxin in the aerosolized form necessary to rain it onto enemy troops. Nevertheless, the Army has asked a Pennsylvania lab to produce a vaccine to counter botulism. In contrast, there is no question that the hardy spores of the rod-shaped soil bacterium Bacillus anthracis can be turned into an aerosol to become an agent of mass death. The British, as an experiment, dropped the spores on an uninhabited island off Scotland during World War II and spread anthrax to sheep. Iraqi military defectors have revealed to Western intelligence agencies that Iraq has been conducting research on the anthrax bacillus.
Anthrax is a disease primarily of cattle and sheep but can spread to humans who handle their carcasses, hides or skin. When spores penetrate the skin, they produce pustules, headaches, fever and nausea. This form of the disease can be treated with antibiotics and is seldom fatal. But if the spores are inhaled, the fatality rate in untreated victims is 90 percent. The spores travel to the lymph glands, germinate into the bacillus form and then travel throughout the body releasing toxin that causes nausea, shock, coma and death from massive blood poisoning. “Within three days you can order your coffin,” retired Soviet deputy Health minister Pyotr Burgasov said on a recent visit to America. He ought to know: one of the worst outbreaks of human anthrax came in April 1979 in Sverdlovsk, a Soviet industrial city in the Ural Mountains. Sixty-four people suffered quick and gruesome deaths–either because of an accidental release of anthrax spores from a secret Soviet biowarfare lab, as the Pentagon believes, or because of contaminated beef, as the Soviets claim.
There are other defenses than vaccination. Protective suits and masks, like those worn during a full-dress biowarfare drill in the desert last week, keep out all anthrax spores. Even unvaccinated, unprotected soldiers who inhale anthrax spores could be saved by a continuous intravenous drip of penicillin, the trouble is that the spores can remain infectious indefinitely–which is longer than combat troops can wear clumsy protective gear.
The Pentagon will not reveal when its crash program to procure anthrax vaccine began, but military sources say that the only American lab making the vaccine–a Michigan Department of Public Health lab–is “way behind schedule.” To catch up, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Army is now seeking to convert a cancer-research lab on its Fort Detrick, Md., base into an anthrax-vaccine-production facility. But the building may not have the safeguards required to contain the anthrax bacillus.
For the next few weeks prevailing winds blow from Iraq, over Kuwait and toward the troops in Saudi Arabia. That is ideal weather for Saddam to release a germ weapon, as the troops know only too well. Vaccinations may allay their fears somewhat. But with the problems of shortages and efficacy, it will be a long time before soldiers stop worrying more that a microbe, not just a bullet, has their name on it.
