Return to Transcripts main page
CNN Saturday Morning News
Interview With Jeanne Guillemin
Aired October 13, 2001 - 08:21 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.
JEANNE MESERVE, CNN ANCHOR: We've been talking about anthrax this morning. Let's get the input of an expert.
Jeanne Guillemin is a professor of sociology and a senior fellow at MIT's secretaries studies program. In 1992, she helped investigate an anthrax epidemic that occurred in the former Soviet Union in 1979. her book, "Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak," chronicles that investigation.
Jeanne Guillemin joins us from Boston this morning.
The Soviets said at the time that this outbreak was the result of tainted meat. What did your investigation show?
JEANNE GUILLEMIN, MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGIST: Our investigation showed that, in fact, the anthrax epidemic, which killed about 70 people, was caused by an emission from a military facility where they had been working on anthrax aerosol.
MESERVE: Just how extensive was the Soviet Union's biological weapons program?
GUILLEMIN: It was really considerable. It was carried out in secrecy. It was carried out in violation of the international treaty against biological weapons. And one of the things we found out in Sverdlovsk, of course, was that it's a very dangerous thing to do, to have a facility that is capable of actually injuring citizens who are right nearby. That's the first set of dangers about biological weapons.
MESERVE: What do you know about where the anthrax they worked with, where is it now?
GUILLEMIN: Well, like our country, the scientists in Russia, the government itself has a library of anthrax strains and we have libraries of anthrax strains here in the United States as well at the CDC and certainly at Los Alamos and in other places. These are mostly for the purposes of strain identification.
Some of these things are useful because we still don't know a lot about anthrax. We're still looking at the DNA and the molecular structure of anthrax. There's a lot about it we don't understand. And some of it is, of course, to try and test vaccines to see if we have really good working vaccines for anthrax. MESERVE: What I'm getting at is how difficult would it be for someone, a terrorist let's say, to get hold of some anthrax from the former Soviet Union or to get the cooperation of some of the scientists who had worked with it there?
GUILLEMIN: Well, that's a very big question. I think we have to back off a little bit here and maybe reassure the public that we live in a world of bacteria. We live in a world where there are viruses around and a lot of them are essentially not very threatening to us or we have good defenses against them.
So the idea, for example, that we have to now be careful about every single laboratory in the world, you know, offering up terrible weapons is kind of a misconstruction.
Anthrax, to get it into weapons form, requires a good bit of technology. It requires those skills that you've referred to. But there aren't that many people with those skills. There aren't -- there isn't a lot of that technology around. And we're trying, I think, internationally we're trying very hard to keep track of those things. We could try harder to keep track of, let's say, where the skilled scientists are who would know how to get anthrax into the weapon form.
And by the way, I mean by that getting anthrax into an aerosol form, getting it into a form where it actually can do the most harm, which is as an aerosol. And part of that process means getting it into a powdered form as a preliminary to that. That's why today we hear everybody talking about anthrax in powdered form.
In the soil, in the naturally occurring environment, it doesn't appear as a powder. But we have ways of processing it so that it does get into powdered form.
MESERVE: And how dangerous...
GUILLEMIN: I think the important point...
MESERVE: And how dangerous is this powdered form? You talked to us about how the inhalation form of anthrax would be very damaging. When we're talking about distribution of a white powder, how alarmed should people be about that?
GUILLEMIN: Well, you have to think of it this way. The spore is the dormant form. It's the sleeping form of the bacterium. So it basically doesn't do anything. But it would like very much to have a host and that host could be -- a grazing animal would be the ideal thing for anthrax. That's really where it belongs as a disease. That's where it evolved and developed.
But if you should have a cut on your hand and you should be in contact with a lot of anthrax spores, you could develop the skin form of anthrax, the cutaneous form of anthrax. If you should eat meat that's infected with anthrax, you could develop the intestinal form. If you inhale aerosolized anthrax, which is very, very unusual in the natural environment, it has hardly ever happened in human history, then you could become sick.
Not everyone is vulnerable, equally vulnerable to anthrax. But inhalation anthrax is the most serious form of it, as we saw with the case down in Florida.
MESERVE: And Jeanne Guillemin, we have to leave it there. But if you want to know more you can chat online with Jeanne Guillemin Monday at 11:00 a.m. Eastern. Just log on to CNN.com/chat.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
