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CNN Live At Daybreak
Anthrax in America: Weapon Difficult to Make
Aired October 31, 2001 - 07:42 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Since anthrax in the mail came to light almost a month ago, we've heard that making the deadly bacteria is no simple matter. Even before the current anthrax scare, the government wanted to find out just how difficult it would be for someone to get what was needed to make it.
Here's what CNN's Gary Strieker found out.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
GARY STRIEKER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: You're looking at a small bioweapons lab here in America that was built right under the noses of U.S. law enforcement. Two years ago, agents for the U.S. Defense Department were given an assignment: Find out how easy it is to build a small plant to produce weapons-grade anthrax.
DR. CRAIG SMITH, INFECTIOUS DISEASE SPECIALIST: For about $1.6 million, they did proceed to obtain all the equipment, either new or used, from common public sources. During the project, while they were acquiring the equipment, no law enforcement agency inquired or was alarmed or suspicious of the activities.
STRIEKER: Using the equipment they bought, the agents produced two pounds of a harmless bacteria. They could just as easily have made the same amount of anthrax. But those federal agents were scientists trained in bioweapons technology. There's much more to making anthrax than buying hardware.
SMITH: This is not someone who has spent a couple of hours on the Internet and then goes out and buys some equipment and produces anthrax. This would still take a lot of basic education and training and some type of professional level of experience.
STRIEKER: It all starts with a small amount of live anthrax culture in a petri dish, which is processed into a liquid slowly in a fermentation tank. The liquid is dried and fed into a milling machine that reduces it to a powder -- tiny particles of spores between one to five microns in size, easily airborne and inhalable directly into a victim's lungs.
All the equipment needed for the process is commercially available, what bioweapons specialists describe as dual use: equipment used to produce other products like pharmaceuticals and vaccines. Experts now say the advanced form of anthrax powder found in the letter sent to Sen. Daschle involves an even more sophisticated processing method producing electrostatic-free spores that are more likely to become airborne.
Until now, that method was believed to have been perfected only in a few state research labs. And there's one more level of lethal escalation with anthrax, a genetically altered strain resistant to antibiotics. But producing it requires an even higher level of science that experts believe would have to be state sponsored.
If there's any comfort to be found in all this, it's that so far, the strain of anthrax used in recent attacks does seem to be treatable with antibiotics.
Gary Strieker, CNN.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
O'BRIEN: Let's follow up now with a chat -- we'll call it anthrax 101, if you don't mind, a primer.
Javed Ali is CNN's bioterrorist analyst, and Leonard Cole is author of "The Eleventh Plague," the politics of biological and chemical warfare.
Welcome to you both.
JAVED ALI, CNN BIOTERRORIST ANALYST: Good morning.
O'BRIEN: Let's begin with you, Dr. Cole, since you're our guest. Give us this sense. We just talked to Maurice Dees. He feels very strongly that this is not the work of homegrown terrorists. Is the indications you have that this is homegrown anthrax?
DR. LEONARD COLE, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY: Look, there's no way we're going to know the answer until we actually have harder evidence than is available now. But I took this whole question to a larger context, the timing, the coincidence in timing between the September 11 incidents and just a week or two after: apparently, the distribution of the anthrax through the mail.
It's very difficult for me to imagine that there isn't some kind of arrangement by the same parties who were responsible for both the Osama bin Laden activities September 11 and now the anthrax spread, which would mean probably there's assistance by some very well informed people -- people, perhaps who work for the Iraqi Program or the former Soviet Union's extensive biological program.
This doesn't rule out the possibility that there's a single person or a couple of bright people who decided they want to be doing these awful things. But it just seems less likely.
O'BRIEN: Javed, do you agree?
ALI: I agree to an extent. While on the one hand, everything Dr. Cole said is certainly a possibility, on the other hand, like also Dr. Cole said, there is no clear pattern to signatures yet. So, you sort of have to rule in every possibility and not rule anything out at this point.
O'BRIEN: Next question for you gentlemen: How hard is it to make weaponized anthrax -- and when I say that term, that means sophisticated enough to do harm. Let's use that as our semantic and end this semantic discussion about weaponization, I guess.
Javed, why don't you go first? How hard is it?
ALI: To make the quality of the material that apparently was in the letter to Sen. Daschle, the highly-concentrated virulent strain, dried powder in the right particle size may be potentially free of electrostatic charge -- that is very sophisticated -- that is a very sophisticated sort of product and that suggests that whoever made that, whether it's a foreign or a domestic source, knew exactly what they were doing. In a terrorism world, or the nonstate active world, that level of sophistication has never been seen before.
O'BRIEN: Dr. Cole, you have a Ph.D. Do you need a Ph.D. to do this?
COLE: No you do not. As a matter of fact, there are a range of steps. You speak of the so-called weaponized grade that was in the Daschle letter. You don't even have to get that sophisticated to have developed anthrax if you've got a dangerous strain to start with and grow large numbers. And you certainly don't need a Ph.D. to grow large numbers of bacteria of any sort.
When you get into that realm of the fine powder, eliminating the electrostatic charge so that the spores flow freely, Javed is certainly correct that this requires a greater degree of sophistication, but there's a mix here of uncertainty, and all we're doing is speculating. We're floating around in a sea, and we don't know where the shores are. We're looking for the shores, and it is certainly imperative that we find, if at all possible, what the source is for all of this.
O'BRIEN: Let's move on. How reliable are the tests for anthrax, and why does it take so long to get results? Why don't we start with you, Dr. Cole?
COLE: There are a series of tests. Some of them are quite simple. They, in effect, eliminate the possibility of anthrax immediately by way of certain stains that can be placed on these materials. And you go through a range of complexity for the tests all the way to careful DNA fingerprinting, which requires more elaborate technical capabilities.
We only have a few laboratories in the United States that are right now prepared to give definitive responses about some of this DNA fingerprinting for anthrax. One thing we ought to be doing and I do believe we're underway is to have many more laboratory capabilities throughout the country -- regions throughout the country where you can get a much quicker turnaround for a more definite answer more quickly.
O'BRIEN: We're running out of time, so I'm going to run to the last question that I have in my mind, which might be on a lot of people's minds this morning. And I'll begin with you Javed. Should we all be vaccinated if that were a possibility?
ALI: I personally don't believe so. First of all, there aren't enough vaccines available to vaccinate everyone in the country, so that's the first issue. And then because the vaccine is right now only produced in one place, even if that decision was made, how quickly could those vaccines be produced? It would take, I would think, at least months, if not years, to ramp that up.
O'BRIEN: Dr. Cole.
COLE: Partial agreement: I do agree we should not be vaccinated now, but until we find the source of whoever is spreading this stuff around, there is that open-ended possibility that we're going to see many, many more cases, and we may get to a point where we have to ramp up very quickly the vaccine supplies and the likelihood that many more people would become vaccinated than we want to think about right now.
O'BRIEN: Dr. Leonard Cole of Rutgers University, Javed Ali, our bioterrorism analyst, thanks very much for clearing this up. We may have you back to continue this discussion, because it's very helpful, I think, to get this out there as clearly as we can make it -- anthrax 101.
We appreciate it gentlemen -- Paula.
COLE: Thank you.
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