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Politics : America Under Siege: The End of Innocence
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To: John Hunt who wrote (12199)12/24/2001 8:44:11 AM
From: John Hunt  Read Replies (1) of 27720
 
Improving the Anthrax brew

Army harvested victims' blood to boost anthrax

Ex-scientists detail Detrick experiments

In an attempt to make America's biological arsenal more lethal during the Cold War, the Army collected anthrax from the bodies or blood of workers at Fort Detrick who were accidentally infected with the bacteria, veterans of the biowarfare program say.

The experiments, during the 1950s and '60s, were based on long experience with animals showing that anthrax often becomes more virulent after infecting an animal and growing in its body, according to experts on the bacteria and scientific studies published at the time.

Former Army scientists say the anthrax strain used to make weapons was replaced at least once, and possibly three times, with more potent anthrax that had grown in the workers' bodies. But some of the key scientists who did the work more than four decades ago are dead, and records are classified, contradictory or nonexistent, so it is difficult to establish with certainty the details of what happened.

The use of human accident victims to boost the killing power of the nation's germ arsenal is a macabre footnote to a top-secret program designed to destroy enemy troops with such exotic weapons as botulism, smallpox, plague and paralytic shellfish poison.

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baltimoresun.com
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