Conspiracy theories. Anthrax pathogen leak in Sverdlovsk


    In the fall of 2001, letters containing white powder began to arrive at the offices of the US Senate. The envelopes contained spores of the bacterium Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax. Letters infected 22 people and killed five. In the photo: an expert in bioprotection suit in the US Senate building, November 2001.

    During the Cold War, conspiracy therapists from the CIA and other Western agencies suspected that the Soviet Union was experimenting with biological weapons. They were not surprised at what happened in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) in April 1979 .

    From April 4, patients suffering from a mysterious disease began to arrive at Sverdlovsk hospitals (the first of them was diagnosed with pneumonia). They had fever, cough and vomiting. During the first two to three weeks, patients with the same symptoms died about five people a day.

    By a strange coincidence , almost all patients on April 2 lived or worked in a very narrow sector of the city area, directed south-south-east from the territory of the military-biological laboratory of the Sverdlovsk military camp No. 19 (Sverdlovsk-19).

    On April 10, doctors conducted an autopsy on one of the corpses and finally made an official diagnosis: anthrax. According to official data, 66 people died during the whole epidemic. According to unofficial data, the number of victims can reach 100 people.

    On April 4, Academician Pyotr Burgasov, who previously worked in the military-biological laboratory of the Sverdlovsk military camp No. 19, urgently arrived in Sverdlovsk from Moscow. By the way, in the same Sverdlovsk-19 they conducted a general vaccination against anthrax.

    Detractors, including Western scientists and direct participants in the events, argued that the epidemic was caused by the accidental release of anthrax spores into the atmosphere from the military-biological laboratory of military camp No. 19 in the Chkalovsky district of the city. Now there is the Center for Military-Technical Problems of Bacteriological Protection of the Research Institute of the Ministry of Defense of Russia, it still continues its activities.

    The map below shows the likely location of patients during the daytime from April 2 to April 6, 1979 (this is a place of work or place of residence). The yellow borders correspond to the regions of Sverdlovsk-19 (in the north) and Sverdlovsk-32 (adjacent to it) and the ceramic factory (in the south). The red color shows the numbers of patients in the order of their addition to the list of the dead. 62 of 66 patients are listed.


    Source: scientific work "The Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak of 1979" , authors - M Meselson, J Guillemin, M Hugh-Jones, A Langmuir, I Popova, A Shelokov, O Yampolskaya, members of the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, Harvard University. Published in the journal Science, November 18, 1994. DOI: 10.1126 / science.7973702, pdf

    Selected cases of the incidence of anthrax among animals have been reported in the Sverdlovsk region.



    Despite this, the authorities announced the official version: an outbreak of the disease is caused by the meat of infected cattle. The data on 27 cases of anthrax contamination of livestock in 26 settlements along the Sverdlovsk-Chelyabinsk route were published.

    In 1988, Soviet doctors, including Academician Peter Burgasov,organized a meeting with American experts at the National Academy of Sciences, where on April 11, 1988, they again confirmed the infection with meat and provided more detailed documents in confirmation.


    Pyotr Burgasov (center) with Soviet physicians Vladimir Sergiyev (left) and Vladimir Morozov (right) answer questions about the release of anthrax from a laboratory where biological weapons are being developed. Picture taken at the School of Hygiene and Health. Johns Hopkins, where the Soviet delegation arrived with documents that indicate contamination of the population with meat

    Despite this, conspiracy theorists continued to assert that in reality the epidemic was indeed caused by the leakage of bacteriological weapons from the military laboratory. They could not understand that this was impossible, because then the USSR would violate the international Convention on Biological Weapons it had signed .

    By the way, even the former president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, in his memoirs “Confession on a given topic” (1990) recalled the outbreak of anthrax in April 1979, mentioning “a leak from a secret military factory”. At that time, Yeltsin worked as first secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional party committee.

    It is curious that American scientists are still studying the 1979 anthrax epidemic. For example, a few months ago came the scientific workanalysis of the genomic sequence of the bacterium Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax, obtained after opening the victims of 1979. Scientists have identified a unique genetic sequence of this pathogen, which allegedly was purposefully bred by Soviet geneticists to counteract known vaccines and antibiotics. Thus, in the future, specialists will be able to determine the origin of biological weapons if they are used in any country.


    A variant of the bacterium Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax, genetically modified in the Sverdlovsk laboratory, occupies a specific place in the phylogenetic branch

    Nevertheless, the authorities of the Russian Federation, apparently, still adhere to the official version of the infection with meat purchased on the market. On February 3, 2015, a victim of anthrax filed an application to the Chkalovsky District Court of Yekaterinburg, demanding compensation for damage to health. The court refused to compensate.

    For more information on conspiracy theories about the Soviet offensive biological weapons , see the 2012 890-page book Soviet Biological Weapons Program .

    Well, residents of Yekaterinburg should buy meat only in trusted outlets. And just in case, watch the wind rose.

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