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2002-09-19-cidrap-umn-edu-perespective-cdc-sees-no-bioterrorism-evidence-wnv

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2002/09/cdc-sees-no-evidence-bioterrorism-spread-west-nile-virus

CDC sees no evidence of bioterrorism in spread of West Nile virus

Filed Under: Anthrax; Bioterrorism; West Nile

By: Robert Roos | Sep 19, 2002

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Sep 19, 2002 (CIDRAP News) – In response to a US senator's speculation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says there is no evidence that bioterrorism has played a role in the spread of West Nile virus to and within the United States.

"As stated repeatedly, we have no scientific evidence to suggest that West Nile virus and West Nile activity in the United States is an act of terrorism or bioterrorism-related," Bernadette Burden, a CDC spokeswoman in Atlanta, told CIDRAP News yesterday.

Last week Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., whose office was the target of an anthrax-laden letter last fall, speculated on a radio talk show about the possibility that the West Nile epidemic is related to bioterrorism. The disease reached the United States in 1999 and spread rapidly across the country this summer. As of Sep 18, the CDC reported 1,641 confirmed cases in 32 states, with 80 deaths.

"I think we have to ask ourselves: Is it coincidence that we're seeing such an increase in West Nile virus, or is that something that's being tested as a biological weapon against us?," Leahy said on a Sep 12 talk show, as quoted by the Associated Press. The show reportedly was aired by WKDR in Burlington, Vt., and WDEV in Waterbury, Vt.

In a written statement released later the same day, Leahy said, "In the times in which we live, questions about our vulnerabilities are unavoidable, and finding all the answers we can is more important than ever. I have no way of knowing what the answers are, but some legitimate questions have been asked, especially before September 11 last year, and no doubt they are being asked anew by the agencies that are working on this."

Blythe McCormack, a Leahy spokeswoman in Washington, said Leahy was not calling for a new investigation of the issue. "It was basically along the lines of, 'We should be looking into every possibility, especially in the environment after September 11,'" she told CIDRAP News. She also said the talk show was cut short so that the station could broadcast President Bush's speech to the United Nations, so Leahy's comments were "kind of incomplete to begin with."

In subsequent news reports, CDC officials said the spread of West Nile in the United States has been consistent with what is known about its natural transmission pathway from mosquitoes to birds and people.

Burden said the CDC considered the bioterrorism possibility when West Nile first reached the East Coast in 1999, killing seven people in the New York City area. "The CDC considers any and all possibilities for a virus coming into the United States for the first time, so certainly the issue of it being planted deliberately was a question that was examined at the time," she said.

In October 1999, the New Yorker magazine published an article describing claims by an alleged Iraqi defector that Saddam Hussein was planning to use West Nile virus as a weapon. The article, by Richard Preston, said bioweapons experts at the CIA had heard of the claim made in a book by the alleged defector, who called himself Mikhael Ramadan, and they recalled the claim when West Nile virus was identified in New York City in September 1999. Ramadan's book, as quoted in Preston's article, said Hussein had boasted that his scientists would develop a strain of West Nile virus "capable of destroying 97 percent of all life in an urban environment." (The fatality rate for West Nile is far below 97%.)

Preston's article also quoted an unnamed Army expert as saying that Soviet Russian biologists had evaluated West Nile as a possible biological weapon but concluded that it wouldn't work very well.

After the New Yorker article appeared, the CIA said it had looked into the possibility that Saddam Hussein had engineered the West Nile outbreak and had concluded there was no evidence. Leahy's office supplied a copy of a Washington Post article published Oct 12, 1999, in which an unnamed CIA official said the agency had found no evidence of bioterrorism. CIA officials said the agency had reviewed press reports on the matter but had not conducted a formal investigation, according to the article.

One Congressional committee also looked into the issue in July 2000 and likewise saw no evidence of terrorism behind the West Nile outbreak. The report, by the minority staff of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, stated, "U.S. law enforcement, public health, and intelligence officials have investigated the possibility that West Nile virus resulted from a bioterrorist attack but believe that this is very unlikely. All indications point to the natural occurrence of West Nile virus, which probably arrived in New York through international trade and travel."

Iraq got seeds for bioweapons from U.S.

ASSOCIATED PRESS |

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation-world/bal-te.bioweapons01oct01-story.html

2002-10-01-the-baltimore-sun-web-iraq-got-seeds-for-bioweapons-from-usa

OCT 01, 2002 AT 3:00 AM

Rep. Jim McDermott, a Washington Democrat, and other members of a visiting American delegation in Baghdad, Iraq, on Sept. 30. The visiting lawmakers warned both Baghdad and Washington not to interfere in the U.N. weapons inspection process. (AP/Jassim Mohammed)

WASHINGTON - Iraq's bioweapons program that President Bush wants to eradicate got its start with help from the United States two decades ago, according to government records getting new scrutiny in light of the discussion of war against Iraq.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent samples directly to several Iraqi sites that United Nations weapons inspectors determined were part of Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program, CDC and congressional records from the early 1990s show.

Iraq had ordered the samples, claiming it needed them for legitimate medical research.

The CDC and a biological sample company, American Type Culture Collection, sent strains of all the germs Iraq used to make weapons, including anthrax, the bacteria that make botulinum toxin and the germs that cause gas gangrene, the records show. Iraq also got samples of other deadly pathogens, including West Nile virus.

The transfers came in the 1980s, when the United States supported Iraq in its war with Iran. They were detailed in a 1994 Senate Banking Committee report and a 1995 follow-up letter from the CDC to the Senate.

The exports were legal at the time and approved under a program administered by the Commerce Department.

"I don't think it would be accurate to say the United States government deliberately provided seed stocks to the Iraqis' biological weapons programs," said Jonathan Tucker, a former U.N. biological weapons inspector. "But they did deliver samples that Iraq said had a legitimate public health purpose, which I think was naive to believe, even at the time."

The disclosures put the United States in the uncomfortable position of possibly having provided the key ingredients of the weapons America is considering waging war to destroy, said Sen. Robert C. Byrd.

The West Virginia Democrat entered the documents into the Congressional Record this month.

Byrd asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld about the germ transfers at a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Byrd noted that Rumsfeld met Hussein in 1983, when Rumsfeld was President Reagan's Middle East envoy.

"Are we, in fact, now facing the possibility of reaping what we have sown?" Byrd asked Rumsfeld after reading parts of a Newsweek article on the transfers.

"I have never heard anything like what you've read, I have no knowledge of it whatsoever, and I doubt it," Rumsfeld said.

He later said he would ask the Defense Department and other government agencies to search their records for evidence of the transfers.

Invoices included in the documents read like shopping lists for biological weapons programs.

One 1986 shipment from the Virginia-based American Type Culture Collection included three strains of anthrax, six strains of the bacteria that make botulinum toxin and three strains of the bacteria that cause gas gangrene.

Iraq later admitted to the United Nations that it had made weapons out of all three.

The company sent the bacteria to the University of Baghdad, which U.N. inspectors concluded had been used as a front to acquire samples for Iraq's biological weapons program.

The CDC, meanwhile, sent shipments of germs to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission and other agencies involved in Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs.

It sent samples in 1986 of botulinum toxin and botulinum toxoid - used to make vaccines against botulinum toxin - directly to the Iraqi chemical and biological weapons complex at al-Muthanna, the records show.

Botulinum toxin is the paralyzing poison that causes botulism. Having a vaccine to the toxin would be useful for anyone working with it, such as biological weapons researchers or soldiers who might be exposed to the deadly poison, Tucker said.

The CDC also sent samples of a strain of West Nile virus to an Iraqi microbiologist at a university in the southern city of Basra in 1985, the records show.