Anthrax: Nature’s Perfect Bioweapon

it's the perfect bio weapon caused by bacillus anthracis a bacteria commonly found in soil across the world anthrax is the disease nightmares are made of its spores can survive hostile environments for centuries at a time able to infect anyone who touches ingests or breathes in even a tiny amount its fatality rate can be over 90 percent yet it's not so much the deadlines of anthrax that makes it so potent but the ease of distribution once refined it can be mailed to victims used to infect their food or water or even sprayed from a plane flying overhead according to experts just 100 kilograms of aerosolized anthrax would be enough to kill three million people and render entire cities uninhabitable for generations thankfully such attacks are exceedingly rare to date only one bioterrorist has succeeded in causing mass casualties with anthrax when spore filled letters killed five americans in 2001. but that doesn't mean there haven't been many close calls across the decades everyone from the nazis to the british to japanese doomsday cults have experimented with anthrax weapons in some cases coming close to making them a terrifying reality [Music] of all the microscopic killers in nature smallpox ebola the plague perhaps none is quite so flat out creepy as bacillus anthracis a rod-shaped bacteria that comes in three strains anthracis exists naturally in soil from the americas to africa to eurasia in some ways it's pretty benign only rarely affecting humans it's non-contagious meaning it can't be passed between people in the way that say coronaviruses can but that's just the silver lining to the deadly cloud that is bacillusanthrasis because while it may not be able to sweep across the planet it has other talents that are far scarier the worst of these may be its ability to produce spores once created these spores can lie dormant in soil or animal fur for decades or maybe even centuries in britain for example viable spores were recently discovered in an excavated hospital dating from the middle ages yet it's only while in the wild that these spores lie dormant once they get inside a body by touch or inhalation all bets are off in no time at all new bacteria are multiplying inside the host spreading toxins with a terrifying speed the disease these toxins cause is known as anthrax and it's among the deadliest illnesses known to man interestingly there are three different ways of contracting anthrax none of them are exactly a barrel of laughs but some are certainly worse than others the most common is thankfully also the mildest cutaneous anthrax is when those spores get inside you via a cut or an insect bite causing dark black lesions on your skin hence the name anthrax from the greek for coal while pretty gross this is also easily treatable even if you ignore all medical advice and just let it do its thing it still only has a 20 chance of killing you the next most dangerous form is the rarest gastrointestinal anthrax is caused by eating infected meat and can kill up to 60 percent of its victims but since most farmers are clever enough not to package and sell meat of an animal that's just died of some super mysterious illness almost no one today gets this type of the disease this just leaves us with the third and final form inhalation anthrax it's at this point that nature turns up the terror to eleven anywhere between a week and two months after exposure you'll start to experience a low fever combined with chills normally this fever will abate after only a few days but this is just a false recovery shortly after your temperature will shoot up extreme pain will grip your chest followed by vomiting fits that expel blood your body will go into toxic shock start shutting down the entire process from onset to death can take just 48 hours untreated and in most cases hospitals won't know you even have it prior to autopsy less than 15 percent of patients survive inhalation anthrax the bad news this is exactly the type most likely to be used as a bioweapon still we should stress that anthrax infections are currently rare in most of the world the us has so few cases that it averages less than one per year prior to 2000 no american had been diagnosed with inhalation anthrax since 1976. globally there may be as few as 20 000 cases a year not bad coming from a population of nearly 8 billion but that doesn't mean humanity's history with anthrax has always been so placid over the centuries bacillus and thrasus has caused death and destruction on an unimaginable scale today the exact origins of anthrax are a mystery as is the moment it first showed up in the historical record there are ancient chinese texts that some think contain the first known description of the disease but others point the finger at the old testament the fifth plague in egypt in the book of exodus is a mysterious disease that quickly kills off livestock this is followed by the sixth plague which causes boils to break out on the skin of humans for some modern readers this sounds a whole lot like ancient egyptians getting cutaneous anthrax after handling their dead and diseased animals just as we still don't know when anthrax appeared wear likewise remains a mystery there's also a lot of genetic diversity among the bacteria in both southern africa and eurasia suggesting the bacteria originated on one of these places but somewhere in either africa europe or asia doesn't exactly narrow things down we're also not totally sure how it got from its birthplace to the soil of every single continent but a good guess is that humans were involved not so long ago stumbling across an animal that had died of some unknown illness was less of a reason to freak out and more of a reason to be like way free stuff clothing made from animals killed by anthrax would still have contained spores spores our forebears then spread around as they traveled one piece of evidence we have for this is that anthrax was one of the few non-native diseases already in the americas when europeans arrived genetic testing has shown that the bacteria likely arrived via alaska fifteen thousand years ago before spreading south exactly what you'd expect to see if it traveled alongside the first humans another clue comes in the form of genetic data that shows one of the bacteria's three varieties going crazy around 3000 bc 3000 bc just happens to line up with the dawn of the bronze age a period where eurasians were just starting to get super into the idea of long distance trade with livestock farming already bringing people into contact with anthrax carrying animals it seems plausible these same people then spread the spores along ancient trade routes and so began several long millennia of b anthracis super killing any humans unlucky enough to get infected with it in the ancient world the roman poet virgil described a plague that spread from animals to humans one that caused high fevers and lesions breaking out on the skin of anyone who touched the animal's fur come the middle ages anthrax was so endemic in europe that it was nicknamed the black bane there's even a theory that the mysterious sweating sickness that afflicted england across the late 15th and early 16th centuries may have been anthrax certainly the symptoms fit vomiting high fever extreme aches death within 48 hours so deadly was the sweating sickness that it terrified chroniclers even those who'd grown up hearing tales of the then recent black death but that's anthrax for you it's freaky and it's deadly as heck in 1770 for example a suspected outbreak in san doming now haiti is said to have killed 15 000 in just six weeks but this would also turn out to be one of the last great gasps of the disease come the 19th century humankind was finally beginning to fight back [Music] the first anthrax breakthrough came in 1850 the year french physician casimir devane identified the rod-shaped bacteria known as bacillus enthrasis however you could argue that humanity's path to understanding the disease actually began seven years earlier on december the 11th 1843. that's when robert koch was born in northwest germany the third of an incredible 13 kids [ __ ] would grow up to be a key figure in early micro biology and it's his work on anthrax that would really make his name in the early 1870s [ __ ] finished his stint as an army doctor in the franco-prussian war and moved to wallstein today wallstein in poland it was a fortunate move for science because [ __ ] arrived as wallstein was in the grip of a deadly plague in just four years this small town had recorded 56 000 animal and 528 human deaths from anthrax the situation was so bad that entire pastures were considered off-limits their soil certain to kill anything grazing there naturally this was exactly the sort of medical problem [ __ ] was obsessed with he began performing experiments testing the blood of dead animals and the soils that had infected them it was [ __ ] who definitively linked anthrax to bacillus enthrasis who discovered its spores and their near indestructible nature it was the first time in history a specific disease was proven to be caused by one type of bacteria and it allowed [ __ ] to make further recommendations such as burning the corpses of infected animals nor were his discoveries limited to germany over in northern britain there had been an ever-growing panic about wool sorter's disease first reported in 1838 it affected only those who worked with wool causing black lesions on hands lesions that sometimes graduated to a deadly pneumonia when two local doctors called edison and bell red of cock's discoveries they realized that wool sorter's disease had to be anthrax although proving it was a gruesome process involving injecting blood from a man killed by the sickness into healthy animals their work transformed british industrial health laws but by then another scientist already built on cock's work to take the human battle with anthrax to the next level by the early 1880s louis pasteur was already famous the inventor of pasteurization his work was saving tens of thousands of lives every year in his native france alone but pastor was also living through an anthrax epidemic scores of humans and uncountable animals were dying from the disease when he heard of cock's breakthrough there was only one thing on pasteur's mind to show that german doofus what real genius looked like in the spring of 1881 having gathered funding from farmers desperate to end the plague pasteur conducted a public experiment of his new anthrax vaccine at pulitzer 4 crowds gathered to watch him inoculate 24 sheep six cows and one goat while an identically sized control group was left unvaccinated nearby on may 31 pasteur injected all the animals with anthrax bacteria and told the crowd to return two days later when they did they found the entire control group dead or dying meanwhile not a single vaccinated animal had succumbed it was a massive breakthrough one that transformed agriculture although not safe for use in humans pasteur's vaccine hugely decreased anthrax outbreaks among livestock coupled with max stern's even safer vaccine of the 1930s it soon looked like anthrax might be consigned to the dustbin of history but even as the fight against anthrax and animals was gaining pace the world's military scientists were coming to a worrying realization what if there was more to anthrax than simply being a scourge what if they could take this bacteria refine it and turn it into a weapon [Music] considering it was a war in which supposedly civilized countries chugged mustard gas at one another it's a miracle anthrax didn't feature in world war one by now the world knew what caused the disease knew about the hardy spores that could infect people even years later yet the only recorded use of anthrax in world war one came from german saboteurs infecting horses sold to the allies from mutual countries despite this having no effect on the war beyond upsetting animal lovers bioweapons were still banned by the 1925 geneva protocol remarkably this is a convention most of the signatories would stick to in the coming decades but not all of them over in the far east a new power was rising that would turn anthrax into a deadly weapon it was during 1932 that imperial japan first started experimenting on human subjects in occupied manchuria prisoners were exposed anthrax among many other nasty diseases and monitored to see how long they lasted the upshot was that by 1937 tokyo had built up a fearsome arsenal of biological weapons weapons it was all too ready to use on china's civilian population from the outbreak of the second sino-japanese war anthrax played a small but grotesque part under the first watch of commander shiroishi japan's unit 731 infected civilian prisoners with the bacteria before vivisecting them without anesthetic anthrax was also among the diseases including the plague that imperial japan sprayed directly over chinese towns all told it's thought ishi's bio-terror campaign killed around 300 000 civilians because reality laughs at the idea of karma she ended the war not being strung up a mussolini style but being granted immunity by the usa congratulations washington but while japan's anthrax program was unique in its scale and cruelty it wasn't the only one to exist during world war ii over 9 000 kilometers away the british were also trying to figure out how to turn the disease against their enemies london's bioweapons program had begun back in 1936 when spies reported that germany was investing in germ warfare when world war ii exploded army research lab portend down began running tests on everything from foot and mouth to rinderpest the plan was to develop a weapon that would mass kill nazi germany's livestock hopefully causing panic and starvation care to guess what disease turned out to be perfect for this in the summer of 1942 the government took control of the uninhabited scottish island of grunard sheep were tethered in open pens and then anthrax spores were dropped from a low-flying plane to call the test a success would be to underestimate just what a slaughter it was the anthrax spores killed all the sheep within three days unfortunately they also rendered the island completely uninhabitable even when the war ended the island remained off limits its soil so contaminated that even creatures living in the chernobyl exclusion zone would be like not gonna visit there it took until the mid-1980s before grenade could be decontaminated and only after the uk government removed the topsoil and doused whatever was left with formaldehyde thanks to incidents like this it pretty soon became clear that stockpiling literal tons of anthrax was a pretty terrible idea by the mid-20th century it was estimated that a mere 100 kilograms would be enough to wipe out three million people and render entire cities uninhabitable for generations clearly humankind couldn't go on like this not if it wanted to survive into the next century it was time to finally ban once and for all the use of bio weapons the only problem was that not everyone was willing to go along cataclysmic disasters can spring from the tiniest things just look at challenger destroyed by a simple seal not working in the cold or chernobyl triggered by an unnecessary safety test for the people of sverdlovsk now known as yet katerinburg the cause of all their misery would eventually be traced to a single broken air filter it was now april of 1979. exactly seven years ago the ussr had joined the u.s and a hundred other countries in signing the biological weapons convention intended to hold weapons research into and the stockpiling of everything from anthrax to smallpox the convention supposedly ended the bioweapons era sadly for sverdlovsk the soviet signatory had apparently kept their fingers crossed that spring 1979 the city was struck by an anthrax outbreak although precise numbers are impossible to come by it's known that anywhere between 68 and 105 people died of the disease at the time the soviet authorities declared all those killed off had eaten infected meat bought on the black market it wasn't until 1992 after the collapse of communism that outside researchers were allowed in to investigate by plotting each of the victims on a map they soon discovered that the disease had moved across the city in almost a straight line a line that led right back to the broken air filter at a nearby bioweapons lab the svedlovsk leak was a grim reminder of just how deadly anthrax can be but it was also a piece of tremendous luck had the wind been blowing in the opposite direction the spores would have been carried right into the city's downtown and hundreds of thousands could have died but the soviets weren't the only ones still playing with biological fire south africa's truth and reconciliation committee would report in the 1990s that the apartheid regime had stockpiled anthrax using the spores for at least one assassination it's also been suspected that rhodesia's white minority government likewise deployed the disease during the bush war although any records have been destroyed but despite these incidents by and large the 70s and 80s saw a steady reduction of nations growing anthrax for their militaries instead nature's perfect bioweapon came to the attention of even scarier entities terrorists the first non-state group to play around with anthrax was likely dark harvest a still mysterious group they managed to remove two barrels of spore laden soil from scotland's grenade island the first barrel was left outside port and down the second was dumped outside that year's conservative party conference although at least one of the barrels was found to be contaminated with spores nobody was sickened in either attack indeed it might not even be fair to call them attacks the speculation that dark harvest were really just a bunch of scottish locals fed up with living so close to a dangerous island after the uk government decontaminated grenade the group were never heard from again so yes it's fair to say terrorism's flirtation with anthrax did not get off to an auspicious start sadly this state of affairs wouldn't last over the following decade two very different very scary people were going to try and go beyond anything dark harvest had attempted unfortunately one of them was going to succeed [Music] march 20th 1995 was a fine day in tokyo one of those bright spring mornings that makes you feel glad you're alive deep below the city though in the darkness of the subway system a very different story was unfolding at the height of rush hour members of the om shinrikyo doomsday cult had simultaneously punctured bags of sarin on multiple trains the resulting cloud of nerve gas killed 13 people and sickened 6 000 it remains the worst terrorist attack in japanese history but it was only when the police raided orms headquarters that they discovered sarin had been the cult's backup option the original plan had been to paralyze tokyo with an anthrax attack one of the wealthiest cults of all time om had recruited from japan's elite targeting those with knowledge of wmds two of their members had worked in microbiology and were able to acquire a small number of anthrax spores spoils that the cult had cultured in gigantic evil smelling bats in 1993 an aerosolized version had been sprayed across tokyo in the hopes that it would kill thousands luckily even the colt's microbiologists weren't anthrax experts the strain they used was incapable of harming humans it was because of this failure that alm turned to creating its own nerve gas but while om's anthrax plans would be a hideous failure the same can't be said for their american counterpart the first sign america got that was under attack by bioweapons came on october the 2nd 2001. it was just three weeks since 9 11. three weeks in which the nation had barely had time to mourn let alone prepare for another terrorist atrocity so when photo editor robert stevens checked into a florida hospital suffering inhalation anthrax everyone assumed it was just a freak accident even when spores were found at his workplace no one dared imagine they could have been placed there deliberately then on october 12th a letter containing powdered anthrax was opened at nbc poisoning an employee two days after that another letter contaminated congress one of the fbi's biggest fears had been realized terrorists were now in possession of weaponized anthrax the 2001 anthrax attack lasted until november 21st when the last victim a 94 year old woman died in connecticut overall 22 people were infected five of whom died today a lot of question marks still hang over the case codenamed amerithrax officially the fbi and doj consider it closed in 2008 they were on the cusp of arresting anthrax expert dr bruce ivins when he committed suicide along alona with rage issues and violent fantasies ivan certainly fit the profile of a lone wolf terrorist however he was never charged and subsequent inquiries found flaws in the investigation still whether it was the work of dr ivans or not the attacks changed the way washington viewed anthrax in the aftermath u.s cleanup crews were dispatched to anthrax hot spots including the abandoned soviet bioweapons lab of irasc 7. there millions of dollars were spent destroying spores in the ground lest groups inspired by the 2001 attacks try and acquire their own anthrax but it seems no one ever did since 2001 there have been no recorded cases of anthrax used as a bioweapon while hoax letters are still a continuing problem in 2019 alone they were mailed in both the usa and the uk actual successful anthrax attacks remain non-existent but that doesn't mean anthrax doesn't still pose a major danger in 2016 an unusually warm summer in siberia saw a layer of permafrost melt for the first time in 80 years as it melted it reactivated dormant spores in the frozen carcass of a reindeer that had died nearly a century earlier from this one corpse an anthrax outbreak swept the region killing untold numbers of reindeer and infecting 72 humans and tragically one 12-year-old boy died if one corpse can cause such damage imagine what hundreds or even thousands could do now think about all those millions of animals that have died of anthrax in polar climates over the centuries animals that were buried in the permafrost and may still carry deadly spores as climate change warms our world it's likely that we'll see more cases like this in russia in canada in alaska in scandinavia more cases of long-buried anthrax suddenly reactivated ready to spread and infect new victims the story of humanity's struggle with anthrax then is far from over while we have the upper hand there's no telling what the future holds because make no mistake this bacteria is one of the most perfect killing machines to have ever evolved a disease capable of making entire cities uninhabitable we may be winning the war against our microscopic enemies but there's still a long way left to go so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe and as always thank you for watching

Channel: Biographics

Views: 2,057,371

Rating: 4.9390268 out of 5

Keywords: biographics, biography, biographies, people, famous people, simon whistler

Id: -T3rUE_nnFQ

Length: 22min 2sec (1322 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021

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