Anthrax: Nature’s Perfect Bioweapon

It is the

perfect

biological weapon caused by Bacillus anthracis, a bacteria commonly found in soil around the world. Anthrax is the disease that causes nightmares. Its spores can survive in hostile environments for centuries and are capable of infecting anyone who touches, ingests or breathes even a small amount of it. quantity, its mortality rate can exceed 90 percent, but it is not so much the time frame of

anthrax

that makes it so potent but the ease of distribution; once refined, it can be mailed to victims to infect their food or water or even spray it from a flying plane.

According to experts, just 100 kilograms of aerosolized

anthrax

would be enough to kill three million people and leave entire cities uninhabitable for generations. Fortunately, these types of attacks are extremely rare, to date only one bioterrorist has managed to cause mass casualties with anthrax when letters filled with spores killed five. Americans in 2001, but that doesn't mean there haven't been plenty of close encounters over the decades. Everyone from the Nazis to British and Japanese apocalyptic cults has experimented with anthrax weapons and in some cases came close to making them a terrifying reality. microscopic killers in

nature

smallpox ebola plague perhaps none are as spooky as bacillus anthracis a rod-shaped bacteria that comes in three strains anthracis exists naturally in soil from the Americas to Africa and Eurasia in some respects it's quite benign only rarely affects humans, it is not contagious, which means it cannot be transmitted between people in the same way that coronaviruses say, but that is only the silver lining of the deadly cloud that is bacilloanthrasis because, While it may not be able to spread across the entire planet, it has other talents that are much scarier, the worst of which may be its ability to produce spores once created, these spores can remain dormant in the ground or on the fur of animals for decades or even centuries in Britain, for example, viable spores were recently discovered in an excavated hospital dating back to the 19th century.

However, only in

nature

do these spores remain dormant once they enter the body through touch or inhalation. All bets are off in no time. New bacteria multiply within the host, spreading toxins at a terrifying speed. The illness. These toxins. The cause is known as anthrax and is among the deadliest diseases known to man. Interestingly, there are three different ways to contract anthrax. None of them are exactly a bunch of laughs, but some are certainly worse than others. Fortunately, the most common is also the milder cutaneous anthrax. when those spores enter you through a cut or insect bite, causing dark black lesions on your skin, hence the name anthrax from the Greek, coal, although it is quite disgusting, it is also easily treatable even if you ignore all the medical advice and just let it do its job.

What follows is that it only has a 20 chance of killing you. The next most dangerous form is the rarer gastrointestinal anthrax, which is caused by eating infected meat and can kill up to 60 percent of its victims, but most farmers are smart enough not to package or sell meat. from an animal that just died from a super mysterious disease almost no one today gets this type of disease this simply leaves us with the third and final form of inhalation anthrax it is at this point that nature turns the terror up to eleven in any time between a week and two months after exposure you will start to experience a low fever combined with chills, normally this fever will subside after just a few days but this is just a false recovery, soon after your temperature will skyrocket, extreme pain It will take over your chest followed by attacks of vomiting. that expel blood your body will go into toxic shock it will start to stop the whole process from start to death it can take only 48 hours without treatment and in most cases hospitals won't even know you have it before the autopsy less than 15 percent of patients survive inhalation anthrax the bad news this is exactly the type that is most likely to be used as a biological weapon yet we must emphasize that anthrax infections are currently rare in most of the world the united states has so few In the United States, inhalation anthrax had been diagnosed since 1976.

Globally, there may be as few as 20,000 cases a year, not bad for a population of nearly 8,000. million, but that doesn't mean humanity's history with anthrax has always been so placid over the centuries. bacillus and thrasus have caused death and destruction on a scale unimaginable today the exact origins of anthrax are a mystery as is the time when it first appeared in the historical record there are ancient Chinese texts that some think contain the first description known about the disease, but others point the finger at the old testament. The fifth plague on Egypt in the book of exodus is a mysterious disease that quickly kills livestock.

This is followed by the sixth plague, which causes boils to appear on the skin of humans for some modern readers. It sounds a lot like the ancient Egyptians contracted cutaneous anthrax after touching their dead and sick animals, just as we still don't know when anthrax appeared. Wear and tear also remains a mystery. There's also a lot of genetic diversity among bacteria in both southern Africa and Eurasia, suggesting the bacteria originated in one of these places, but somewhere in Africa, Europe, or Asia doesn't exactly narrow things down. We're also not entirely sure how it got from its birthplace to the soil of each continent, but a good guess is humans.

If we were involved not long ago, stumbling upon an animal that had died of some unknown disease was less a reason to be scared and more a reason to be as if clothing made from animals killed by anthrax still contained spores. The ancestors then spread out as they traveled. One piece of evidence we have for this is that anthrax was one of the few non-native diseases that were already in the Americas when the Europeans arrived. Genetic testing has shown that the bacteria probably arrived through Alaska fifteen thousand years ago. spreading southward exactly what you would expect to see if traveling alongside early humans, another clue comes in the form of genetic data showing that one of three varieties of bacteria went crazy around 3000 BC. 3000 B.C.

It simply aligns with the dawn of the Bronze Age, a period when Eurasians were just beginning to engage with the idea of ​​long-distance trade with livestock farming that was already putting people in contact with anthrax-carrying animals, seems plausible. that these same people then spread the spores along ancient trade routes and thus began several long millennia of b anthracis super killing any human unlucky enough to be infected with it in the ancient world, the Roman poet Virgil described a plague which spread from animals to humans and caused high fevers and lesions that would burst on the skin of anyone who touched the The fur of animals in the Middle Ages anthrax was so endemic in Europe that it was nicknamed the black nightmare.

There is even a theory that the mysterious sweating sickness that afflicted England in the late 15th and early 16th centuries may have been anthrax; Without a doubt, the symptoms coincide with vomiting, high fever. death from extreme pain within 48 hours the sweating sickness was so deadly that it terrified chroniclers, even those who had grown up hearing stories of the then recent black plague, but that's anthrax for you, it's strange and deadly in 1770, for For example, a suspicious outbreak. Now in Saint Dominguez, Haiti is said to have killed 15,000 people in just six weeks, but this would also prove to be one of the last major attacks of the disease when in the 19th century humanity was finally beginning to fight the first advance of anthrax. . 1850, the year French physician Casimir Devane identified the rod-shaped bacteria known as bacillus enthrasis;

However, one could argue that humanity's path to understanding the disease actually began seven years earlier, on December 11, 1843. It was then that Robert Koch was born in northwestern Germany, the third of an incredible 13 children. He would grow to become a key figure in early microbiology and it is his work on anthrax that would really make him famous. In the early 1870s he finished his period as a military doctor in the Franco-Prussian War and moved to Wallstein. Today Wallstein in Poland was a fortunate move for science because it arrived when Wallstein was in the grip of a deadly plague.

In just four years this small town had recorded 56,000 deaths of animals and 528 people from anthrax. The situation was so bad that entire pastures were destroyed he considered it forbidden for his soil to kill anything that grazed there, naturally this was exactly the kind of medical problem he was obsessed with. He began conducting experiments testing the blood of dead animals and the soils that had infected them. He was the one who definitively linked anthrax to bacillus enthrasis. who discovered its spores and almost indestructible nature was the first time in history that a specific disease was shown to be caused by a type of bacteria and allowed additional recommendations to be made such as burning the carcasses of infected animals nor were his discoveries limited to In Germany , in northern Britain, there had been growing panic over wool sorter's disease, first reported in 1838.

It affected only those who worked with wool, causing black lesions on the hands, lesions that were sometimes It turned into fatal pneumonia when two local doctors called Edison and Bell. Following Cock's discoveries, they realized that the wool sorter's disease had to be anthrax, although they demonstrated that it was a gruesome process that involved injecting blood from a man killed by the disease into healthy animals. His work transformed British industrial health laws, but by then another scientist had already built on Cock's discoveries. work to take the human battle against anthrax to the next level in the early 1880s louis pasteur was already famous the inventor of pasteurization his work saved tens of thousands of lives each year in his native france alone, but pastor was also living an anthrax epidemic Dozens of humans and countless animals were dying from the disease when he learned of the rooster's advance.

There was only one thing on Pasteur's mind to show that German fool what true genius looked like in the spring of 1881, after he had raised funds from farmers desperate to end the plague. Pasteur conducted a public experiment of his new anthrax vaccine at the Pulitzer. 4 crowds gathered to watch him inoculate 24 sheep, six cows and one goat, while an identically sized control group was left unvaccinated nearby on May 31. Pasteur injected all the animals with the anthrax bacteria and told the crowd that they returned two days later, when they did, they found the entire control group dead or dying, while not a single vaccinated animal had succumbed.

It was a massive advance that transformed agriculture, although it is not safe for use in humans. Pasteur's vaccine greatly decreased anthrax outbreaks among livestock. Along with Max Stern's even safer vaccine of the 1930s, it soon seemed that anthrax might be relegated to the dustbin of history, but even as the fight against anthrax and animals was gaining pace, the world's military scientists They were coming to a worrying realization of: what if there were more? to anthrax than simply being a scourge. What if you could take this bacteria, refine it and turn it into a weapon considering that it was a war in which supposedly civilized countries threw mustard gas at each other?

It is a miracle that anthrax did not appear in World War I. By now the world knew what caused the disease, knew about the resistant spores that could infect people even years later, but the only recorded use of anthrax in World War I came from German saboteurs who infected horses sold to the Allies. from common countries even though this had no effect. about war beyond annoying animal lovers biological weapons were still prohibited by the geneva protocol of 1925 surprisingly it is a convention that most signatories would adhere to in the coming decades, but not all In the Far East a new power was emerging that would change anthrax into a deadly weapon.

It was during 1932 that Imperial Japan began experimenting on human beings in Manchuria.busy. The prisoners were exposed to anthrax, among many other nasty diseases, and were monitored to see how long they lasted. The result was that by 1937 Tokyo had built a fearsome arsenal of biological weapons that it was all too willing to use against the Chinese civilian population. Since the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, anthrax played a small but grotesque role under the first surveillance of the commander shiroishi the japanese unit 731 civilian prisoners infected with the bacteria before vivisecting them without anesthesia anthrax was also among the diseases, including the plague, that imperial japan sprayed directly on chinese cities.

Ishi's bioterrorist campaign is believed to have killed around 300,000 civilians because reality laughs at the idea of ​​karma. She ended the war without being skewered. Mussolini style, but the United States granted him immunity, congratulations to Washington, but while Japan's anthrax program was unique in its scale and cruelty, it was not the only one that existed during World War II more than 9,000 kilometers from distance, the British were also trying to find out. he discovered how to turn the disease against its enemies the london biological weapons program had begun in 1936 when spies reported that germany was investing in germ warfare when world war ii broke out the omen army research laboratory began testing everything, From foot and mouth disease to rinderpest the plan was to develop a weapon that would kill Nazi Germany's livestock en masse, hopefully causing panic and famine.

Be careful to guess which disease turned out to be

perfect

for this in the summer of 1942 the government took control of the uninhabited Scottish island of Grunard the sheep were tied outdoors the pens and then anthrax spores were dropped from a low flying plane height. To say the test was a success would be to understate what a carnage it was. Anthrax spores killed all the sheep in three days. Unfortunately, they also left the island completely uninhabitable even when the war ended the island remained off limits its soil so contaminated that even the creatures living in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone would as if not visit there was necessary until the middle of the 1980s before the pomegranate could be decontaminated and only after the UK government removed the topsoil and sprayed what was left with formaldehyde thanks to incidents like this.

It soon became clear that storing literal tons of anthrax was a pretty terrible idea. In the mid-20th century it was estimated that just 100 kilograms would be enough to kill three million people and leave entire cities uninhabitable for generations. Clearly, humanity couldn't. Keep it up, no, if you want to survive into the next century, it was time to finally ban the use of biological weapons once and for all, the only problem is that not everyone was willing to go ahead. Catastrophic disasters can arise from the smallest things. Look at the Challenger destroyed by a simple seal that doesn't work in the cold or Chernobyl caused by an unnecessary safety test for the people of Sverdlovsk, now known as Katerinburg, the cause of all their misery would eventually be traced back to a single broken air filter , as it was now.

April 1979. Exactly seven years ago, the USSR had joined the US and a hundred other countries in signing the biological weapons convention aimed at maintaining weapons research and stockpiling of everything from anthrax to smallpox. . The convention supposedly ended the era of biological weapons, unfortunately for Sverdlovsk. The Soviet signatory had apparently crossed his fingers because in the spring of 1979 the city was hit by an anthrax outbreak, although precise figures are impossible to obtain. Between 68 and 105 people are known to have died from the disease at the time Soviet authorities declared that all of those killed had eaten infected meat purchased on the black market.

It was not until 1992, after the collapse of communism, that outside researchers were allowed to investigate by plotting each of the victims on a map and soon discovered that the disease had spread throughout the city. In almost a straight line, a line that led directly to the broken air filter at a nearby biological weapons laboratory, the Svedlovsk leak was a grim reminder of how deadly anthrax can be, but it was also tremendous luck if the wind it would have been blowing. In the opposite direction the spores would have been carried directly into the city center and hundreds of thousands could have died, but the Soviets were not the only ones still playing with biological fire the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee would report in the 1990s. that the apartheid regime had stockpiled anthrax using the spores for at least one murder, it is also suspected that the white minority government of Rhodesia also used the disease during the Bush war, although all records have been destroyed, but despite Of these incidents overall, the 1970s and 1980s saw a steady decline in nations growing anthrax for their armies.

Instead, nature's perfect biological weapon caught the attention of even more terrifying entities, terrorists, the first group. The non-state party that played with anthrax was probably Dark Harvest, a still mysterious group, they managed to extract two barrels of spore-laden soil from Scotland. Grenada Island, the first barrel was left outside the port and the second was dumped outside that year's conservative party conference, although at least one of the barrels was found to be contaminated with spores, no one became ill in either attack In fact, it might not even be fair to call out the speculation that Dark Harvest was actually just a group of Scottish locals fed up with living so close to a dangerous island after the UK government decontaminated a grenade.

The group was never heard from again so yes it is fair to say that terrorism's flirtation with anthrax did not get off to an auspicious start unfortunately this state of affairs would not last for the next decade two very different and very terrifying people were going to try to go further Beyond anything Dark Harvest had tried, unfortunately one of them was going to succeed. March 20, 1995 was a fine day in Tokyo, one of those bright spring mornings that make you feel happy to be alive in the depths of the city, although in the darkness of the subway system a very different story was unfolding at the height of rush hour.

Members of the apocalyptic cult om shinrikyo. had simultaneously punctured bags of sarin on several trains, the resulting cloud of nerve gas killed 13 people and sickened 6,000. It remains the worst terrorist attack in Japanese history, but it was only when police raided Orms headquarters that they discovered sarin had been the cult's backing. As an option, the original plan had been to paralyze Tokyo with an anthrax attack. One of the richest cults of all time. Om had recruited among the Japanese elite to attack those with knowledge of weapons of mass destruction. Two of its members had worked in microbiology and had been able to acquire a small number of anthrax spores that the sect had grown on giant, smelly bats in 1993.

An aerosol version had been sprayed throughout Tokyo in the hope that it would kill thousands. . Fortunately, not even the colt's microbiologists were experts on anthrax. The strain they used was incapable of harming humans. It was because of this failure that Alm resorted to creating his own nerve gas, but while Om's anthrax plans would be a horrific failure, the same cannot be said for his American counterpart. The first sign the United States had that it was under attack with biological weapons came in October. on September 2, 2001. Only three weeks had passed since September 11. Three weeks in which the nation had barely had time to grieve, much less prepare for another terrorist atrocity, so when photo editor Robert Stevens was admitted to a Florida hospital suffering from inhalation anthrax, everyone assumed it was just a strange accident, even when spores were found at his workplace, no one dared to imagine that they could have been placed there deliberately.

Then, on October 12, a letter containing powdered anthrax was opened at NBC and an employee was poisoned, two days after another letter contaminated Congress, one of the FBI's greatest fears had come true. The terrorists were now in possession of weaponized anthrax. The 2001 anthrax attack lasted until Nov. 21, when the last victim, a 94-year-old woman, died in Connecticut. In total, 22 people were infected, five of whom died today. There are still many question marks. hang on the case codenamed amerihrax officially the FBI and the Department of Justice consider it closed in 2008 they were about to arrest anthrax expert Dr. Bruce Ivins when he committed suicide along with anger issues and violent fantasies .

Ivan certainly fits the profile of a lone wolf terrorist. However, he was never charged and subsequent investigations found flaws in the investigation, whether it was the work of Doctors Ivan or not. The attacks changed the way Washington viewed anthrax after U.S. cleanup teams were sent to anthrax hot spots, including the abandoned Soviet biological weapons laboratory. from irasc 7. millions of dollars were spent there destroying spores in the soil so that groups inspired by the 2001 attacks could try to acquire their own anthrax, but it appears that no one has done so since 2001, there have been no recorded cases of anthrax used as a biological weapon While fake letters remain an ongoing problem in 2019 alone, they were mailed in both the US and the UK.

Actual successful anthrax attacks remain non-existent, but that doesn't mean anthrax doesn't still pose a significant danger. In 2016, an unusually warm summer in Siberia saw a layer of permafrost melt for the first time in 80 years. latent spores in the frozen carcass of a reindeer that had died almost a century earlier from this carcass. An anthrax outbreak swept through the region, killing an untold number of reindeer. and infecting 72 humans and tragically a 12 year old boy died if a corpse can cause such damage. Imagine what hundreds or even thousands could do now, think of all those millions of animals that have died of anthrax in polar climates over the centuries.

Animals that were buried in permafrost and may still contain deadly spores as climate change warms our world, we are likely to see more cases like this in Russia, Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia, more cases of long-buried anthrax , suddenly reactivated, ready to spread and infect. new victims, the story of humanity's fight against anthrax is far from over as long as we have the advantage, there is no telling what the future will bring, because make no mistake, this bacteria is one of the most perfect killing machines ever has developed a disease capable of causing entire cities uninhabitable, we may be winning the war against our microscopic enemies, but there is still a long way to go, so I really hope you found the video interesting, if so, hit the button thumbs up below, don't forget to subscribe and as always thanks for watching