Illegal Drugs and Anthrax

[jdkid]

Hi ya's
Heres a scarry thought to think about HIV did it realy start the way we have been told or was it made to control over pop in 3 world ???was it made as a warfair(?) drug . ...anthrax ,smallpox etc etc are not manmade so getting it would not be hard. mass producting it is the hard bit that could be why so few have been actacked .. even releassing the common cold on a mass scale will upset day to day running .
catch ya
JD Kid

 

[ERNIEB]

In Nam smoking heroin was far and away the most popular method, two main reasons. It was plentifull and cheap, and needles and syringes were hard to come by. I don't recall hearing about or seeing anyone snort it but maybe they did.
An addict will usually resort to the most effcient means of ingesting his drug of choice.
I read that the Taliban have wanted to do away with the poppy fields since they came to power, and had talked about phasing them out gradually. But changed their minds and this year said no more period. Since disobeying the Mullah's orders usually ends up with a one way trip to the soccer stadium, the farmers didn't plant any this year.


Ernie

 

[Bird]

Aaaa, JD, sounds like you may be as skeptical as I am at times about what our governments and news media tell us./w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif

Bird

 

[ERNIEB]

Bird, For sure it's coming from a lab of some kind. My knowledge of bacteriology is limited, but I would guess that with a few pieces of equipment, the right growth media, and a source of spores (such as the carcass of any infected animal) someone could grow himself quite a bit of Anthrax.

Ernie

 

[RPM]

Bird,

I don't know that much about it - but anthrax is a common disease of cloven-hoofed animals in third world countries. Armed with a text-book and some petri-dishes it wouldn't be that hard to take a slew of samples from dead animals and then test. The right text-books would tell you how to grow cultures, prepare slides, stain the samples, identify the bacterium etc.

A couple of difficulties:

1. Getting hold of a virulent strain of anthrax. It would need to be highly infective. I believe that the strain being used in these attacks came from a common lab strain - originated in an outbreak of anthrax in a herd of cows in England 50 years ago. I may be wrong of course.

2. Separating the anthrax from other bacteria so that a pure strain can be grown (without infection from other common airborne bacteria). This would be very hard and require a special, sterilized environment. Note the comments from the Senate today on how pure the anthrax was that was sent to Daschle -- this purity also adds to the lethality.

Next would be the mass reproduction of the stuff. Even enough to be put in a letter would be a big undertaking (a fraction of an ounce). Never mind a few pounds of the stuff. An attack on a city would require hundreds of pounds.

Usually the anthrax is then stored in liquid form. To be used it has to be dried and coaxed into its 'spore' form -- a hardened state in which the bacterium can survive indefinately. For some of these letters I understand the contents were soaked in the liquid anthrax and then sent - hence the warnings about stained letters.

To weaponize the strain it then would have to be milled into particles below a particular size that could be easily inhaled. Again a non-trivial challenge. Not something you can do with a pestle and mortar. The Japanese terrorists tried spraying Tokyo with liquid anthrax but since the particles weren't weaponized it was ineffective.

I think that's about it - each of these steps would require years of experience and engineering knowledge to get right.

I therefore have to think that this spate of attacks has been sponsored by a large organization (or state) as none of this is basement-biology type stuff. If I was the FBI I would also be checking pharmacy records for sales of Cipro (the preferred antibiotic) prior to these attacks. Wouldn't you get worried if you had jars of this stuff sitting around and you got a cold or a dose of the flu???

Patrick

 

[DrDan]

We viewed the bacillus anthrax under the microscope when taking bacteriology in vet school. Actuall it is quite easy to grow in blood agar and very easy to isolate pure colonies. The problem is in getting the spores collected. The bacillus must be put under adverse conditions so it turns into spores which are very tough items. They have been known to live in the soil and reinfect grazing animals 17 to 25 years after they were initially deposited.

I saw some of the colonies growing in blood agar and the petri dishes were taped shut. Very scary stuff. We were trained to transfer it and restreak a new blood agar plate to continue the growth.

The reason these disease organisms are kept is to use to produce vaccines and do research on at a later date. I mean if we didn't have any to work with, how would we test new antibiotics?

Personally, I think all this crap - the planes and now the anthrax is like a fly buzzing around our collective butts. I think it's about time to turn up the wick on our bombings. I am so proud of GW. The more they screw around with him the more he does exactly that: Hits them harder. Those AC-130A "Spectre's" will sure help. Heres a link about that plane. http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/outdoor/od11a.htm My god it's like a solid sheet of cannon fire out of them. I had a friend who was in the service and they were giving a demo for some congressmen. He and a few of his helpers had to stake out a balloon on eack square foot of a 1 mile square field. This plane came over at high altitude and sprayed the field. Every cotton picken balloon was broke except for three with one pass. Now there's some firepower. Come on GW lets flex our biceps a little and make em listen.

DrDan

 

[EdDekker]

cowboydoc,

It is illegal now.

There was an incident in 1995. Larry Wayne Harris who had a BS degree in microbiology, worked as a well and tank inspector, a member of Aryan nations, ordered a plague culture from a commercial laboratory supply firm. He said he and his friends wanted to produce a new vaccine to protect the country. There was no law against ordering plague so he was convicted of mail fraud for his phony stationery.

The story of this nutcase is far too complex to detail here. It includes his arrest in 1995 after the mail ordered plague and the sample tubes of plague bacteria was found in his car, and his arrest in 1998 for threatening an Anthrax attack on Las Vegas and the New York subway. (He had a veterinary Anthrax vaccine not an Anthrax culture.) A web search on his name will show many pages with parts of the story.


Procedures and laws for ordering pathogens were revised after this case showed how easy it was to buy nasty stuff.




Ed

 

[gws]

Larry wayne harris is a raceist nutcase. His 1998 Las Vegas arrest by federal agents for having anthrax made headlines around the world. These charges were dropped with no media attention. The anthrax he had was a natural occuring strain. He was however arrested and convicted of having bubonic plague.

Gary.

 

[PitbullMidwest]

<font color=blue>I read that the Taliban have wanted to do away with the poppy fields</font color=blue>

This seems to contridict the information presented in an Arthur Kent documentry I saw. He said that Afganistan has some of the most furtile ground for growing wheat anywhere in the world but farmers are forced to grow poppies to support the international drug trade. The crops are confiscated, paying the farmer nothing, and sold to finance the current civil war.

Gotta' wonder why a farmer would risk dying for a crop he isn't paid for, can't feed his family with and would rather not grow.

 

[EdDekker]

RPM,

There are a few straight forward processes and (thankfully) a few major problems for someone who wants to produce Anthrax spores.


1) Getting the Anthrax culture is hard for an individual but easy for a government - have the Ministry of Health order a commercial culture from a laboratory supply firm for 'medical research'. Iraq ordered (and received) Anthrax and other 'interesting' cultures from US and European firms in the 1970's.

There have been some new reports this week that the Florida cases were from a strain of Anthrax isolated by the University of Iowa in the 1950's. This strain is widely distributed to labs around the world.

An individual must (now) start with soil from a farm which had an Anthrax outbreak in the last 50 years. Culture the soil in media favorable to Anthrax and isolate the Anthrax. ( Sophomore college laboratory techniques are needed.)
Produce enough of the sample (steps 2 through 5) and test it. (On animals? Mail it to a tabloid? ...)
Robin Cook had a book (fiction) in which an Anthrax culture was prepared this way, I don't remember the books title offhand.


2) Separating a pure culture of the Anthrax bacteria from a mixed culture is fairly simple. The old C L Stong Amateur Scientist column in the Scientific American had several articles on microbiology in the 1950's and 1960's. These articles included the technology for preparing pure cultures. (Advanced High school techniques are required here.)


3) Mass replication. Have you ever home brewed beer? Same technology. Prepare culture medium that you bugs like, keep it sterile until you add your culture, keep it at the right temperature. Repeat until you have enough. Its the same basic technique for both yeast and bacteria.


4) Induce the Anthrax to enter the spore state. This is a harder problem. There should be techniques documented in the microbiology journals to stress the Anthrax bacteria and induce spore formation.


5) Prepare a cleaned preparation of the spores produced in 4. The spores naturally clump. The clumps of spores are large enough that they can not be inhaled into the lungs. The surface of the spores must be washed to remove the sticky and then dried. My assumption from the public information is that this requires repeated wash and centrifuge operations. What is used to wash the spores without bringing them out of the spore state is secret. This is extremely hard.
The dried residue must then be broken up. Simply grinding (as in mortar and pestle) the sample may destroy the spores.
The estimate from a former director of USAMRID (on TV last night) is that at most 5 Americans could do this without years of research.

There are however several hundred (or thousand) Russians, Iraqi and North Korean's who know how to process Anthrax.

ABC news is reporting that the NBC Anthrax was a brown granular powder. Basically a stage 4 product on our scale. The Anthrax sent to Tom Dashile's office was a pure white, powder fine preparation, which was as good as (and almost certainly is) a government preparation. It will be interesting to find out why we are dealing with two different Anthrax preparations in envlopes wth the same style lettering, with the same postmark.


Soaking paper in liquid Anthrax would probably not be effective. There would be no chance of any airborne effectiveness and only limited chance of of a skin infection.


Droplets of Anthrax in water would be large enough that they could not be inhaled deeply and would quickly settle out of the air.





Ed