Anthrax war has Colorado connections
Fort Collins CDC lab plays significant role in critical investigation
Jim Erickson
November 8, 2001 - Several Fort Collins microbiologists and epidemiologists are key players in the monthlong probe of the anthrax attacks that have killed four Americans and sickened 13 others.
About a dozen researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Fort Collins laboratory have spent several weeks assigned to the investigation in Atlanta, New York and Washington, D.C., said Dr. Duane Gubler, director of the lab.
Dr. Lyle Petersen, deputy director of the Fort Collins lab, heads the CDC team investigating New York-area anthrax cases.
Dr. David T. Dennis, chief of the plague branch at the Fort Collins lab, is the lead CDC scientist searching for clues in the death of Kathy L. Nguyen, 61, a New York woman who contracted inhaled anthrax.
Fort Collins research microbiologists May Chu and Scott Bearden helped set up a CDC lab in Atlanta to process hundreds of cotton swabs sent there each day from post offices and other sites of potential anthrax exposure.
Before the postal attacks, the CDC lab in Atlanta conducted about 10 anthrax tests a day. The new lab can process 500 samples.
"I think as public health servants we've crossed the line, and it may be a long time -- or never -- until we'll get back to where we were before," said Chu, who returned to Fort Collins this week for a breather.
"We had never dealt with a mass bio threat -- intentional release -- like this before. This is the first."
Investigations of infectious disease outbreaks typically proceed by identifying the responsible germ, determining how it got there and how it spreads, then containing it, Chu said.
Anthrax sleuths still can't say where the germ came from.
"If it's hamburger meat, you can identify a cluster of people who are sick at the same time, with the same kind of exposure, and you can trace it back to what they ate," Chu said.
"This was something that was different and extraordinary for us."
Bearden also returned from the East Coast this week. He said he was struck by the havoc the microscopic bug inflicted on the country's public health system.
"I think we have a greater appreciation for what this organism -- which occurs naturally in the environment -- can do," he said.
Chu and Bearden are among the roughly 90 federal employees who work at the CDC's Division of Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases, on the Colorado State University campus in Fort Collins.
Researchers study mosquito-borne diseases such as West Nile virus, dengue, and yellow fever.
Fort Collins is also the CDC lab responsible for studies of plague and tularemia, contagious and deadly bacterial diseases the federal agency classifies as "agents of highest concern" for bioterrorism.
With the cooperation of state and local health agencies, the Fort Collins lab monitors plague levels in wild prairie dog colonies along the Front Range.
"Any time you see a lot of prairie dogs dying, one of the first things you think about is plague," Gubler said. "You can take samples from those dead prairie dogs or collect fleas around the burrows.
"And if it's plague, you can usually isolate it from either the carcasses or the fleas."
Could a terrorist with microbiology training do the same thing, then use the isolates to make a weapon?
"It's not as easy as it sounds," Gubler said. "There's a lot more to making it a deliverable weapon than just isolating it."
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