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The Ustinov Incident In early April of 1988, Ken Alibek received a telephone call in his office in Moscow. It came from his friend and colleague Lev Sandakhchiev, the director of a Biopreparat facility called Vector, a huge, isolated virology-research campus in the larch forests outside Novosibirsk, a city in western Siberia.Dr. Sandakhchiev reported that there had been an accident. At this time, the Soviet biological missile warheads was designed to be loaded with strategic /operational smallpox virus, Black Death, and anthrax. The Marburg virus had potential for weaponization, too. Marburg is a close cousin to the Ebola virus, and is extremely lethal. Dr. Ustinov was forty-four years old, and had been doing basic military research on the Marburg virus, studying its potential as a weapon. He was been wearing a spacesuit in a Level 4 hot lab, injecting guinea pigs with Marburg virus. He pricked himself in the finger with a needle, and it penetrated two layers of rubber gloves. Nikolai Ustinov exited through an air lock and a chemical decon shower to Level 3, and used an emergency telephone to call his supervisor. The supervisor decided to put Ustinov into a biocontainment hospital, a twenty-bed unit with steel air-lock doors, like the doors of a submarine, where nurses and doctors wearing spacesuits could monitor him. He was not allowed to speak with his wife and children. Ustinov did not seem to be afraid of dying, but, separated from his family, he became deeply depressed. On about the fourth day, Ustinov developed a headache, and his eyes turned red. Tiny hemorrhages were occurring in them. He requested a laboratory notebook, and he began writing a diary in it, every day. He was a scientist, and he was determined to explain how he was dying. What does it feel like to die of Marburg virus? What are the psychological effects? For a while, he maintained a small hope that he wouldt die, but when his skin developed spontaneous bruises he understood what the future held. When Ustinov began to vomit blood and pass bloody black diarrhea, the doctor gave him transfusions, but as they put the blood into him it came out of his mouth and rectum. Ustinov was in prostration. They debated replacing all the blood in his body with fresh new blood-a so-called whole-body transfusion. They were afraid that that might trigger a total flooding hemorrhage, which would kill him, so they didn't do it. Alibek did not know exactly which strain of Marburg had infected his colleague. It had been obtained by Soviet intelligence somewhere, but the scientists were never told where strains came from. The Marburg virus seems to live in an unknown animal host in East Africa. It has been associated with Kitum Cave, near Mt. Elgon, so the Soviet strain could have been obtained around there, but Alibek suspected that it came from Germany. In 1967, the virus had broken out at a vaccine factory in Marburg, a small city in central Germany, and had killed a number of people who were working with monkeys that were being used to produce vaccine. One of the survivors was a man named Popp, and Ahbek thought that Ustinov was probably dying of the strain that had come from him. The final pages of Dr. Nikolai Ustinov's scientific journal are smeared with unclotted blood. His skin developed starlike hemorrhages in the underlayers. Incredibly the Vector scientists had never seen this, he sweated blood directly from the pores of his skin, and left bloody fingerprints on the pages of his diary. Ustinov died on April 30, 1988. An autopsy was performed in the spacesuit morgue of the biocontainment hospital. If this was indeed the Popp strain of Marburg virus,and who could say? It was incredibly lethal. It produced effects in the human body that were stunning, terrifying. Alibek says that a pathology team removed Ustinov's liver and his spleen. They sucked a quantity of his destroyed blood,out of a leg vein using large syringes. They froze the blood and the body parts. They kept the Ustinov strain alive and continually replicating in the laboratories at Vector. They named the strain Variant U, after Ustinov, and they teamed how to mass-produce it in simple bioreactors, flasks used for growing viruses. They dried Variant U, and processed it into an inhalable dust. The particles of Variant U were coated to protect them in the air so that they would drift for many miles. In late 1990, Biopreparat researchers tested airborne Variant U on monkeys and other small animals in special explosion-test chambers at the Stepnagorsk plant. Marburg Variant U proved to be extremely potent in airborne form. They found that just one to five microscopic particles of Variant U lodged in the lungs of a monkey were almost guaranteed to make the animal bleed, and die. With normal weapons-grade anthrax, in comparison, it takes about eight thousand spores lodged in the lungs to pretty much guarantee infection and death. Alibek said that by the fall of 1991, just before Boris Yeltsin came to power, Marburg Variant U was on the verge of becoming a strategic/operational biological weapon, ready to be manufactured in large quantities and loaded into warheads on mirvs. But it seems quite possible that when the Russian biowarfare facilities fell on hard times and biologists began leaving Russia to work in other countries, some of them carried freeze-dried Variant U with them, ready for further experimentation. Variant U started, perhaps, with a monkey worker named Popp, but its end in the human species is yet to be seen. |
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| By: Jan Olofsson, June 2001 | <<back | top |