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Forty years ago, Dave Ankarlo and other volunteers
could have stood in a cloud of deadly nerve agent to test the
effectiveness of the Army's chemical protective clothing.
And they may not have been told the risks involved.
But the Army says the rough and reckless days of germ warfare testing
ended long ago. In a protective-clothing test conducted last year,
Ankarlo was subjected to chemicals that only simulate the
characteristics of actual nerve agents. He attended briefings about
the hazards of the test and signed detailed consent forms. And he
could have bailed out of the test at any time.
"All precautions were taken to extremes," he said in an interview. "If
there were any concerns, there is no way in heck I would be involved
in something like that."
Despite the precautions, the safety of test volunteers and workers at
this isolated desert outpost is still questioned. Critics of military
testing say issues surrounding Dugway's research work are the same
being debated nationally over past government plutonium experiments of
unsuspecting citizens.
"The informed consent today doesn't always appear to be truly
informed," said Steve Erickson, spokesman for the military watchdog
group Downwinders. "And because of past problems we've seen at Dugway
with the conduct of these experiments, we know things can go wrong,
people get exposed and they have little recourse for justice after the
fact.
"It's a credibility question," he added. "Can this command conduct
useful research without stepping over the line resulting in real
hazards to employees?"
Dugway testing will be among the topics discussed Wednesday in
Washington, D.C., when the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs holds
hearings on what some lawmakers see as "a pattern" over the past 50
years of the military exposing people to dangerous concentrations of
hazardous material without fully explaining the risks, then leaving
those people on their own to prove they had been harmed.
"We like to think that abuses such as radiation exposure, exposure to
chemical or biological weapons and other outrages are a thing of the
past, but the legacy continues," said committee chairman Sen. John D.
Rockefeller, D-W.V.
But Dugway officials point to the recent Battledress Overgarment test
as an example of current efforts to protect test volunteers and
employees.
The clothing test also explains why the Army still conducts human
experimentation.
"Dugway uses mannequins," said base spokeswoman Melynda Petrie. "But
mannequins can't put protective clothing through its paces in a normal
range of motions as humans could."
The test, conducted in November, was to determine the effectiveness of
protective clothing issued to troops in the Persian Gulf War. The
clothing - a jacket and pants made with material that absorbs chemical
agents - had never been field tested against the aerosolized or
"dusty" chemical agents believed to be possessed by Iraq.
"It was a concern to me, being in Desert Storm where we had to wear
this stuff all the time," said Ankarlo, a 32-year-old mechanic and
National Guardsman. "So I was glad doing a test like this . . . you
could be protecting thousands of lives."
It was more than a sense of patriotic duty, however, that got Ankarlo
to volunteer. It is his job, performed without additional pay, in
addition to his primary duties as a mechanical technician.
His employer, Lockheed Corp., a private contractor at Dugway that
conducted the test, asked about a dozen other employees with similar
job descriptions to participate. None of them turned down the request,
test officials said. Under Army policy, their identity is confidential
unless they choose otherwise. Only Ankarlo and another volunteer
consented to an interview with the Deseret News.
During the four-day test, they stood in a dry riverbed dressed in
jacket, pants, overboots, gloves and hooded respirator while test
officers sprayed a yellowish dust cloud of chemicals simulating actual
aerosolized agents. After being sprayed, they ran in place or in a
figure eight to determine if body movements allowed any simulant to
leak through.
After the spraying and exercising, the volunteers filed into a trailer
where they took off the clothing. Researchers then wetted a small area
of skin and removed the water sample, which would be analyzed to find
out if any simulant penetrated the clothing. Test results have not
been released.
"Pretty neat," Ankarlo said, describing the test experience.
"Sometimes you couldn't even see the guy right next to you. You were
breathing, trying to smell it (through the hooded respirator), but you
couldn't smell it."
"It was like being in a jet plane flying through a cloud," added
volunteer Kerry Preston, an electrical technician.
Dugway sought input from the Human Use Committee at Army Test and
Evaluation Command in Aberdeen, Md., before going forward with the
test. But Dugway spokeswoman Petrie said submitting the test to the
committee had nothing to do with the chemical simulants. It was
because the test initially involved a new monitoring device - a pill
containing a tiny microprocessor the volunteers would have ingested,
allowing medical personnel to better monitor physical vital signs and
heat exhaustion during the test.
But the pill didn't catch the committee's attention. "Because we were
walking people through a cloud and we weren't familiar with the cloud,
we wanted to send it to the surgeon general," said Pete DeLaney, human
factors engineering group leader for the Army's Test and Evaluation
Command.
The Army's surgeon general found the test a minimal risk to
participants.
"Broadly speaking that means it's about as risky as most things in
daily life," said Chuck Dasey, spokesman for the Army's Medical
Research Development, Acquisition and Logistics command.
The cloud consisted of chemicals with health effects ranging from
relatively harmless to toxic to unknown, depending on dosages and
other variables (see chart). Volunteers wore the recommended
respirator masks to protect them from possible hazards of inhaling the
chemicals. An emergency medical staff was also on hand, and volunteers
were required to shower three separate times after each day of
testing.
But test officials indicated the chemical cloud didn't warrant all the
precautions. "It's harmless stuff, but we have to cover our bases,"
Lockheed test officer Lamont Law said, noting that if the chemical
cloud could have harmed anyone, he wouldn't have subjected his
employees to it.
"They are my people. They are my assets. If they are gone, I am out of
business," Law said. "If one of my guys went down because of heat
overload, I would have run in the cloud without any protection."
But critics of military testing are suspect of the fearlessness of
Dugway workers and assurances that simulants are harmless. They cite
instances documented in past Deseret News reports of the Army using
dangerous simulants and then stopping the practice after scientific
literature revealed the substances caused debilitating and sometimes
deadly diseases.
One case involved an infectious bacterium called serratia mercescens.
The Army sprayed the exotic-sounding toxin over the San Francisco Bay
area in 1950, sending 10 unsuspecting people to the hospital, one of
whom died, with infections. The Army stopped using the simulant in
1979 after experts found the organism could cause meningitis, wound
infection and arthritis.
In 1957, a Dugway-based experiment dropped zinc cadmium sulfide
particles over a vast region of the eastern United States to detect
dispersion of biological agents over a large land area. Then in 1973,
scientific literature said the fluorescent particles used in such
quantities were known to be toxic in almost all physiological systems.
The simulant is no longer used.
More recently, the Army pulled a seemingly "safe" chemical - dimethyl
methylphosphonate or DMMP - from its list of outdoor nerve agent
simulants in 1988, when independent studies confirmed it was a
suspected carcinogen
Rutgers University professor Leonard A. Cole, who is working on a
sequel to his 1988 book on military testing, "Clouds of Secrecy," said
he found government researchers assume what may be harmless in one
circumstance will remain harmless in others. "They introduce these (simulants)
into the environment in odd ways, such as dense clouds, that increase
the chance for infection."
Even the exemplary Battledress Overgarment test had its safety
problems. In written comments submitted to the Army, Down-wind-ers
criticized the lack of critical information in the consent form
volunteers signed. The four-page document detailed the physical rigors
of exercising in protective clothing and the risk of overexertion or
heat exposure. But there was no mention of exposure to chemical
simulants.
"They were given a very thorough briefing (on the simulants) before
the test," assured Law. But, he acknowledged that not having the
volunteers sign off on the simulants was a mistake that was corrected
"after the fact" with another consent form detailing the simulants
they had been exposed to.
Cole also criticized the test for lacking any follow-up examinations
of volunteers or long-term monitoring. "One cannot be sure of the
health consequences," he said.
Law said the volunteers were told to contact Dugway Health Clinic if
they experienced any problems from the test.
But Ankarlo dismissed the consent-form mixup as "shuffling some
paperwork" and said concerns over simulant testing are exaggerated.
"Every test I have been in has been nothing. All precautions are
taken. Sometimes it seems like too many precautions," he said, noting
he often helps set up testing equipment. "There are more risks with
the chemicals at home."
But even Ankarlo has his limits on volunteering to be the guinea pig.
If I was on vacation or going fishing the next day,
I wouldn't
volunteer," he said.
*****
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Components of a "dusty" cloud
Chemicals used to simulate a "dusty agent" cloud sprayed at human
volunteers in the November 1993 Battledress Overgarment test:
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