Anthrax

WASHINGTON -- Pentagon officials continue to play down the exodus of military personnel over the anthrax vaccine, despite continued warnings by subordinates that the mandatory six-shot regimen is leading hundreds of National Guardsmen and reservists to resign or seek transfers.According to interviews and documents obtained by The Sun, more than 50 percent of pilots in some Air National Guard squadrons are resigning or seeking nonflying jobs. Some documents describe units "struggling" to conduct missions and training with the "hurdle" of the anthrax vaccine, which some military personnel fear is neither safe nor effective.

Here is an excerpt of an editorial from the San Diego Union-Tribune, which was published Tuesday.THE Pentagon's decision to inoculate U.S. military personnel against highly lethal anthrax contamination is firmly supported by potential battlefield threats and sound medical science. Defense Secretary William Cohen should not abandon this necessary program because of the tiny minority of soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines who have refused to take the vaccine based on unsubstantiated claims about its safety.

WASHINGTON -- Stung by continued pilot resignations over the mandatory anthrax shots, the Air Force is creating a task force to examine the year-old vaccine program, a high-level effort expected to press for more aggressive education and to study whether the losses are affecting military operations.Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, the vice chief of staff, ordered the creation of the anthrax task force early this month after at least one-quarter of a California Air Force Reserve squadron quit rather than take the six-shot vaccine.

WASHINGTON -- Nine pilots from the 103rd Fighter Wing of the Connecticut Air National Guard -- about 25 percent of its combat-ready fighter force -- have resigned from flying duties rather than take the Pentagon's mandatory anthrax vaccinations, saying they have concerns about possible health effects and question its value as a defense against the biological weapon.All nine of the citizen soldiers, mid-level officers and veterans of Desert Storm, Bosnia and the Iraqi "no-fly" zones, left the reserve unit during the past month, said unit members.

"Vector," by Robin Cook. Putnam. $24.95.Robin Cook has written plenty of scary medical thrillers, but his latest, "Vector," is probably the scariest.That's because it deals with a real and imminent danger to everyone -- biological terrorism.As the novel opens, Yuri Davydov, a disgruntled New York taxi driver, and a couple of hate-filled members of a violent far-right organization are plotting to spray the Big Apple with deadly anthrax bacterium and botulism toxin.Yuri, who had been a technician in a Russian bioweapons factory, manufactures inhalational anthrax in his basement laboratory.

Thomas L. Rempfer, a captain with the Connecticut Air National Guard, is a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate who has served tours as a senior fighter pilot in Bosnia and the Middle East. Recently, Rempfer and dozens of other pilots resigned rather than disobey an order to take a mandatory anthrax vaccine.Pilots refusing the vaccine have expressed concerns about the safety of the vaccine. Pentagon officials maintain that the shots have been successfully administered to more than 200,000 service members.

MOSCOW -- A new and terrifying picture is emerging of the deadliest known incident in the history of biological weapons.It was an accidental outbreak of anthrax in the city of Sverdlovsk in 1979, and it now appears that the disease was both more widespread and considerably more virulent than Russian officials have ever acknowledged.The picture that emerges of the Sverdlovsk incident is one of helpless doctors and hundreds -- or perhaps even thousands -- of people dying quickly and in great pain.

Last week, the FBI arrested two men, one a white supremacist, and charged them with obtaining deadly anthrax microbes for use as a terrorist weapon. It was good, fast, better-wrong-than-dead work by the bureau's field office in Las Vegas -- even if weekend laboratory tests showed the anthrax to be a safe form of the bacteria used in animal vaccines, not the military-grade capable of killing thousands.I'll make a bet: Before this espisode passes, we'll hear -- or find on the Internet -- criticism from the loonies that the feds were overzealous, trampling the civil rights of innocent, God-fearing oddballs who are simply looking for unique ways to express their political views.

COLLEGE PARK -- Raymond A. Zilinskas vividly recalls that hot June morning when he sat in a school bus loaded with chemists and biologists as they rolled down a desolate highway, through the sandy wasteland west of Baghdad."

Army officials have changed their minds: They will not use force to give shots to soldiers who refuse their anthrax vaccinations."The Army is amending its policy. We're not going to do forcible vaccinations," said Army spokesman Capt. Scott Bertinetti. "We're not going to strap anybody down."The Pentagon is proceeding with plans to vaccinate all 2.4 million active-duty, National Guard and Reserve service members against anthrax.Anthrax, a livestock disease, is considered relatively easy to turn into a biological weapon and is nearly 100 percent fatal in the inhaled form likely to be used as a weapon.

The biodefense lab at Fort Detrick in Frederick began a thorough search of its freezers yesterday to ensure that it has an accurate inventory of the deadly bacteria, viruses and toxins accumulated there over a period of 40 years, Defense Department officials said. Col. John P. Skvorak, commander of the U.S. Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases, ordered a "stand-down," or pause in ordinary operations, and a complete inventory last week after 20 vials of "biological select agents and toxin" (BSAT)

WASHINGTON - Amid continuing questions from some lawmakers and others about the FBI's investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks, the FBI is asking the National Academy of Sciences to review its probe, Director Robert S. Mueller III said yesterday. Among the issues that the independent organization likely would examine is how FBI analysts traced anthrax powder that was mailed to two U.S. senators and several news organizations to the Fort Detrick laboratory of Bruce E. Ivins, who killed himself in July.

FREDERICK - Six weeks after Bruce E. Ivins killed himself, the cremated remains of Ivins, the Army scientist and anthrax suspect, are stored at a funeral home here, awaiting the outcome of an unusual probate court proceeding. In a will he wrote last year, a few months before the FBI focused the anthrax letters investigation on him, Ivins wrote of his wish to be cremated and have his ashes scattered. But fearing that his wife, Diane, and their two children might not honor the request, he came up with a novel way to enforce his demand: threatening to make a bequest to an organization he knew his wife opposed, Planned Parenthood.

In an extraordinary briefing yesterday, the FBI described in detail how a small army of scientists managed to trace samples of anthrax from the 2001 letter attacks to the bureau's chief suspect, microbiologist Bruce E. Ivins, at the Army's biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick in Frederick. A panel of six microbiological experts joined top officials from the FBI's laboratory in the briefing - apparently an attempt to address concerns expressed by some scientists and others about the strength of the evidence linking Ivins to the high-profile case.

The impending closure of the FBI's investigation of the anthrax-laced mailings of 2001 has generated new interest in the question: Are we safer today than we were when anthrax was distributed up and down the Eastern seaboard, killing five people and sickening 17 others? Unfortunately, the answer is probably no - despite our government's best efforts to prevent a future bioterrorist incident. Bioterrorism is like no other national security threat. What makes defending against it so challenging is the blurred line between beneficial research and destructive intent.

In case I ever turn up dead while being investigated by the Feds, and they release all the suspicious stuff they've uncovered about me, let me explain right now why I recently Googled "novel kill scientist poisoned strawberry." I was not trying to find a novel way to kill a scientist with a poisoned strawberry, OK? I was trying to remember a book I had read, in which several seemingly unrelated characters mysteriously start dying - including, I thought, a scientist who grew strawberries as a hobby, ate one and died - and it turned out they had all been involved in some secret scheme.

A day after the Justice Department released hundreds of documents purporting to link Bruce E. Ivins to the 2001 anthrax killings, scientists and legal experts criticized the strength of the case and cast doubt on whether it could have succeeded. Federal investigators presented a raft of circumstantial evidence this week intended to prove Ivins' guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But officials lacked direct evidence, such as hair fibers, DNA samples or handwriting analysis, that the eccentric microbiologist created the deadly powder in his Fort Detrick lab. Questions also remain about Ivins' ability to convert the spores stored in his lab into the powder sent through the mail.

Bruce E. Ivins may not have been the anthrax killer, but scientific, postal and investigative evidence painstakingly compiled by federal agents and released yesterday points strongly to his guilt, as declared by the FBI. The case, detailed by prosecutors and investigators, is circumstantial - there are no witnesses or incriminating statements about the attack that killed five people and terrorized the nation in 2001. But it presents a plausible portrait of Mr. Ivins as the mastermind and sole perpetrator of the first bioterrorist attack in the United States . Mr. Ivins' suicide last week prevents a conclusive resolution of the 7-year-old case.

Federal authorities released hundreds of pages of documents yesterday in an effort to show that they could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Bruce Edwards Ivins, the Army scientist who killed himself last week, was the sole person responsible for the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks. The investigators explained how they traced the anthrax used in the attacks back to Ivins' lab at Fort Detrick in Frederick, how Ivins allegedly stymied their investigation, and how what they called a history of mental illness and obsessive behavior helped them build a case that is circumstantial but, they said, irrefutable.

It's a simple, cheerful life, but with occasional grim complications that one simply ignores, such as mortality or the '70s or the demise of the downtown department store. I love my downtown store, a block from the old stone courthouse where Alvin "Creepy" Karpis of the Ma Barker gang was tried for kidnapping in 1936, near a fine old popcorn shop, just down the street from a haberdashery where the other day I got fitted for a seersucker suit and was shown how to tie a bow tie. A great mystery suddenly made clear.