The Deadliest Anthrax Accident in History

One April morning in 1979, something peculiar and frightening began happening in the countryside near Sverdlovsk (now called Ekaterinburg) Oblast USSR. People were becoming ill with a mysterious illness. Their symptoms were troubling: high fever, vomiting, extreme weakness, coughing, and sometimes pulmonary hemorrhaging.

Medical personnel were alarmed at the sudden influx of patients--most victims had the same frightening symptoms, and some had been brought in after collapsing on the street. The first victim died within four days. Some victims died quickly thereafter, some lingered on the brink of life and death and died later. A few of the afflicted survived, but barely.

Panic spread quickly, fueled by the fact that no one knew, yet, what the disease was, or why it was infecting so many at once. It seemed there was no way to escape--the infection was everywhere. Someone in the area notified authorities in Moscow--something was terribly wrong in Sverdlovsk.

It took two days before the illness was diagnosed. By that time, rumors had already started and had spread as quickly as the disease. Some in the region reported hearing an explosion in the days before people fell ill. Some spoke of the military facility close by and believed the explosion came from that facility. Could the explosion be connected to the epidemic? Many in the area believed so.

Panic soared when authorities announced that anthrax was the cause of the illnesses. Health officials from across the USSR swooped down upon the area to begin a swift decontamination and vaccination program. All medical facilities in the region transported afflicted patients to a city hospital that contained an infectious disease facility. There, under the watch of the highest trained medical experts, the patients continued to die.

The Soviets gave a brief, nonspecific and evasive report about a germ outbreak to a Russian language newspaper in Germany. The report drew attention from countries across the world. U.S. intelligence looked into the situation but intelligence operatives' initial reports were sketchy.

A source told of the disease outbreak, anthrax was rumored; another source told of a possible accident at a suspected biological warfare facility in Sverdlovsk-- however, the facts were uncertain. In an intelligence report given five months after the outbreak, most details remained unknown to U.S. intelligence. Through the following years, however, the truth was gradually exposed.

The Kremlin told the world that the people in Sverdlovsk had been sickened from eating contaminated meat. Soviet officials loudly refuted any claim that the leak came from an illegal biological weapons facility. They denied reports of an accident and held to their infected meat story despite claims from other sources--the claims that most of the victims had suffered from the airborne form of anthrax and not intestinal anthrax. Airborne strains of anthrax are not acquired from eating contaminated meat.

Finally, 13 years later, Boris Yeltsin admitted that the anthrax outbreak had been the result of an accident at the military facility (U.S. intelligence called the facility "Compound 19"). After the revelation, U.S. scientists were allowed to investigate the area.

U.S. intelligence long had good reason to believe that anthrax labs had not been confined to Sverdlovsk; Yeltsin confirmed that the Soviet military had not stopped experimenting with anthrax after the accident in Sverdlovsk, but had merely, secretly, moved the experiments to other locations. According to Yeltsin, who expressed dismay about the Soviet military's actions, Soviet testing included contaminating areas of land and allowing animals to inhabit the contaminated areas.

In the end, the U.S. determined that a large volume of anthrax spores had escaped Compound 19. These spores had then been carried on the wind to the region nearby, sickening all in the path of the toxic plume, and killing at least 64, but possibly as many as thousands of people. To this day, however, there is still speculation about what exactly happened that fateful April in Sverdlovsk.

The information for this article was derived from several declassified cold war documents, including documents from the CIA, FOIA, and DIA from the National Security Archives and includes:

CIA Intelligence Report, BIOLOGICAL WARFARE - USSR: Additional Rumors of an Accident at the Biological Warfare Institute in Sverdlovsk. 10/15/79.

CIA Intelligence Memorandum, Soviet Biological Warfare Agent: Probable Cause of the Anthrax Epidemic in Sverdlovsk, (ca. 1980), Classification Deleted