Germs on the loose

Bioweapons tests tainted sites around the globe. Will the mess ever be cleaned up?

by Eileen Choffnes

===The United States - The U.S. Biological Defense Research Program had its origins in World War II. Begun in 1942 within the Chemical Warfare Service, its primary mission was research on anthrax and botulism. The U.S. policy for use of biological weapons during and shortly after World War II was retaliatory only. From the end of World War II until the U.S. renunciation of offensive biological weapons in 1969, the army developed both offensive and defensive biological weapons capabilities.
===All U.S. field test sites were abandoned at the end of the war—with the exception of Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. From 1951 to 1969, hundreds, if not thousands, of open-air germ warfare tests were conducted at Dugway on human volunteers and animal test subjects.¹¹ Many of the aerosol dispersal tests during the Cold War introduced non-indigenous diseases (or increased the geographic range of indigenous diseases) to Utah and surrounding states, including encephalomyelitis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, psittacosis, Q fever, anthrax, brucellosis, plague, tularemia, and hydatid disease, all of which are now considered endemic among the native wildlife. In 1959 and 1960 an epidemic of Q fever was found among Utah desert wildlife, but it is not known whether the disease was a result of Dugway’s human and animal field trials, which began in the early 1950s. The Utah Health Department has also reported cases of Q fever among humans—all subsequent to the 1955 human and animal field tests and releases at Dugway.
===Testing was not limited to Dugway proper. At least two dozen other sites nominally administered by the Dugway Proving Grounds—including unrestricted public lands—were used from the late 1940s through the 1960s to test virtually everything in the army’s BW arsenal, from wheat stem rust and rice blast to anthrax and plague. The army deliberately infected and released a variety of animals and insects to determine the rate and extent of disease dispersal through native animal populations. The army’s live-agent testing program, designed to include trials at sea, in the tropics, and in the arctic, reached far beyond the borders of the continental United States to include sites in Alaska, Central America, the Far East, the Caribbean, and over the Pacific Ocean. Aimed at determining animal, plant, and human reactions to exposure to putative BW agents, the army allegedly conducted clandestine tests in South Korea, Liberia, Egypt, and Okinawa.¹² In 1981, troops training at the Jungle Warfare Training Center at Fort Sherman, Panama, contracted the mosquito-borne disease Venezuelan equine encephalitis (VEE)—an outbreak that was eventually linked to a military experiment conducted in 1970. As a consequence of this test, VEE remains an endemic threat in certain areas of Central America.¹³
===Little progress has been made to date in identifying, let alone containing or eliminating the contamination at Dugway, despite the requirement to do so established in the Defense Environmental Restoration Act passed by Congress in 1986. Even less thought and attention has been given to defining the nature and extent of the problems caused by tests at Dugway and other sites around the world.
 

11. Joe Bauman, "Cold War Left Utah a Contaminated Legacy," Deseret News, February 28, 1998, p. A1. For number of tests conducted at the Dugway Proving Grounds, see also Charles Piller and Keith R.Yamamoto, Gene Wars: Military Control Over the New Genetic Technologies, (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1988).

12. Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45, and the American Cover-Up, (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 232.

13. "Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis: Report of an Outbreak Associated with Jungle Exposure," Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, November 1984.