Creating anthrax not so difficult

24 Oct, 2001 09:47 PM3 mins to read

By STEVE CONNOR

Specialists in microbiology believe that acquiring the technology for producing anthrax spores in a powdered form is well within the capability of a skilled university graduate with access to funding.

American defence officials demonstrated last year in a secret programme called Project Bacchus that it is possible to buy fermenting equipment legally on the open market which can mass-produce bacteria similar to Bacillus anthracis.

Not only did they build a small-scale production facility on a relatively small budget of a few hundred thousand dollars, but they did so without attracting the attention of US security agencies.

Professor Harry Smith of Birmingham University, who worked on anthrax at the Porton Down military establishment 40 years ago, said that growing anthrax bacteria can be carried out with fairly standard laboratory equipment.

Getting hold of the bacteria in the first place, however, is perhaps more difficult. Either the microbe can be isolated from the wild – it is endemic in many countries where it lies dormant in the soil – or it can be acquired illicitly from one of the many research institutes where it is stored.

The FBI has said that the anthrax used in the United States attacks all appear to be from the same source. It is the Ames strain, named after a town in Iowa where veterinary scientists first isolated it in the 1960s. However, the Ames strain has been widely distributed over the past 30 years and the name is often used to describe closely related strains that may in fact have been cultured elsewhere in the world.

Ken Alibek, who helped run the Soviet Union's secret biowarfare programme before he defected in 1992, said that sophisticated facilities are not required to make finely milled anthrax powder, which is needed to cause inhalation anthrax, the most dangerous form of the disease.

"You can use readily available equipment to do this," Dr Alibek says in New Scientist magazine. It is again not difficult to buy the anti-caking agents needed to produce particles of powdered spores that are small enough to float easily in the air. There is, however, no evidence that the people behind the latest attack have done this.

Dr Alibek said that Russia and Iraq did not mass produce the Ames strain for their bioweapons programme, but this does not necessarily mean that the anthrax used in the current attacks did not originate in one of these countries.

"If I were a terrorist I would certainly not use a strain known to be from my country," he told New Scientist.

- INDEPENDENT

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