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CNN Saturday Morning News

How Can Pathogens be Obtained?

Aired October 13, 2001 - 08:16   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.
MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN ANCHOR: No connection has been made yet between the anthrax cases and any terrorist threat, but people are still wondering: How does a terrorist or rogue nation obtain anthrax or any other deadly pathogen for a biological weapon?

In several ways, as CNN's Charles Feldman reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHARLES FELDMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): If you are not a research scientist, you almost certainly have no business trying to buy anthrax. But that doesn't mean you can't.

JAVED ALI, BIOTERRORISM EXPERT: There's possible ways, multiple possible ways that that could be done. One, they could try to purchase it from a legitimate culture repository.

FELDMAN: That's right, commercial institutions right here in the U.S. that are, under recently imposed restrictions, supposed to only sell anthrax to those with proper credentials. There are ways around the regulations governing the sale of anthrax.

ALI: They could steal it maybe from a university lab or another cultural repository that has it.

FELDMAN: And then there are those with good intentions, scientists interested in eradicating that disease who eagerly help out fellow researchers by trading various anthrax strains.

DR. MARY GILCHRIST, UNIVERSITY HYGIENIC LABORATORY: If you've isolated a strain of anthrax from an animal, for example, and began to study it and people wanted to borrow the strain to use it to do other studies, you would very readily send it to them and hope that their work could help save the world as yours did.

FELDMAN: And it wasn't just scientists wanting to save the world who got samples of anthrax. Before the Gulf War, even Iraq was able to easily buy the bacterium from this U.S. supply company. And no one knows how much of what Iraq produced from those samples still exists.

DAVID KELLY, BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS PROJECT: They specifically asked for those particular strains, and they were appropriate for biological warfare because they were known to be robust. They had a high virulence and were known to be lethal. FELDMAN: It's not just anthrax that's a potential problem. With more than 500 U.S. labs storing various amounts of 42 pathogens considered dangerous, there's a large menu of potential biological weapons to choose from, and you don't have to be a well funded terrorist group to order.

In 1995 microbiologist Larry Wayne Harris bought bubonic plague bacteria through the mail to conduct what he said was his own research. CNN interviewed him in 1996 about how easy the transaction was.

LARRY WAYNE HARRIS: And I asked them, I said OK, is there any regulations governing this stuff? They said no, there's none whatsoever. There is no regulations.

FELDMAN: While new restrictions might make it more difficult to buy deadly pathogens, some say the obstacles may not be great enough.

Charles Feldman, CNN, Los Angeles.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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