Anthrax

From Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia written in simple English for easy reading.

Anthrax, also called splenic fever, is an infectious disease. It is very dangerous, and often leads to death.

Anthrax is most common in animals, but people can also catch it if they come in contact with infected animals. But it probably does not spread from person to person.

There are 89 different kinds (strains) of anthrax. One of them, the Ames strain, was used against the United States in 2001 as a chemical weapon.

Treatment for anthrax are often antibiotics, such as penicillin.

Anthrax is generally used with the Russians who made many of the strains during the Cold War era to use against the United States if war was ever to brake out. One of the symptons that came with catching Anthrax were large black lumps and then extremely ugly and deep looking scabs that would spread across the body and at that point the person/victim is as good as dead. It can be stopped but it is very difficult.

At one point on April 2, 1979, there was a leak at one of the plants just outside of Sverdlovsk that made anthrax during the Cold War. 94 people were affected and 64 of those people were killed. The others were affected late enough for word to get around that these people were getting killed and the plant and government found out and were able to save the other 30 people. The USSR blamed the deaths on another strain of anthrax that the people catched by digesting infected meat. Invesigators from the United States and others found the story believable but during the Carter administration the case was opened again and searched and found flaws and shared their supsicions with the public, but once again, the USSR denied it and still blamed it on the meat becuase of fear that they would be found out that they were making chemical weapons which violated the treaty of Biological Weapons Convention and an investigation was imeddiatly conducted my other countries to see if their suspicions were true or not. It wasn't untill 1992 that the president Boris Yeltsin revealed the truth of all that had happened during the time of the leak of the gas into the city of Sverdlovsk. After Yeltsin admitted to the release of the anthrax spores he allowed a team of western scientists to come in and examine the area to see for themselves what happened. The KGB had conducted a very thourogh "cleansing" or conviscating all surviving records from all hospitals and other areas with recorded acounts and descriptions of the anthrax. The scientist made do and were able to track down survivors and people who witnessed the anthrax {such as nurses in hospitals}. .Their results showed that on the day of the incident all the victims were clustered along a straight line downwind from the military facility. Livestock in the same area also died of anthrax. After completing their investigation, the team concluded the outbreak was caused by a release of an aerosol of anthrax pathogen at the military facility. But they were unable to determine what caused the release or what specific activities were conducted at the facility. According to an interview with Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, former first deputy chief for Biopreparat (the civilian part of the Soviet biological weapons program), the anthrax airborne leak had been caused by workers at the military facility who forgot to replace a filter in an exhaust system. The mistake was realized shortly after, but by then some anthrax spores were released. Alibekov says if the wind had been in the opposite direction that day--toward the city of Sverdlovsk--the death rate could have been in the hundreds of thousands.

To this day, Western inspectors have not been allowed to visit this military facility.