To Fight Plague, Look to Russia's Past

[tetano]

by Janet Ginsburg


A century before Ebola, SARS, or avian flu began making headlines, another invisible killer was carving a swath of death and fear across the Russian Empire: the plague. And even in an age that predated PCR and even Watson and Crick, the remarkable way the tsarist government set out to fight what was then an unknown organism could be a model for today's preventive strategies. "I thought I was being so creative for the last five years [by] suggesting that we look for zoonotic diseases independent of species bias," says veterinary pathologist Tracey McNamara, whose work on sick crows in 1999 helped lead to the identification of West Nile virus. "[The Russians] tried to detect disease threats before they spilled over into the human population."

The Imperial Anti-Plague (AP) Program began operations in 1890 ? four years before the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, was identified ? and grew by the eve of the Russian Revolution to include 11 laboratories. The link between sick rodents and human outbreaks was well known, so the Russians, with several plague-endemic areas in the Caucasus and Central Asia, moved to attack the enemy right in its animal-host burrows. "Thanks to the system, natural carriers were limited to their region. They didn't bring disease to new areas," notes Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley, a senior project manager for the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California, which is producing a report on the AP system.

During the three years of the Russian civil war ending in 1921, almost all the Imperial AP labs were closed. But even in 1918, the Soviets realized the importance of the AP effort and created the Regional Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology at Saratov University Medical School. The Institute was soon spun off as an independent agency known by its shorthand name: Mikrob. By 1922, the AP system's Soviet era was well established, with Mikrob in charge of five labs stretching from the Urals to Kazakhstan. Field biologists, especially in the early days, were a hardy lot, often traveling by horseback, camel, and even the occasional cow. They camped in the open, dangerously near their infectious quarry, and deaths from accidental exposure were not unheard of.

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Read more: To Fight Plague, Look to Russia's Past - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences http://www.the-scientist.com/article...#ixzz0pg0EVaii

[tropical]

Re: To Fight Plague, Look to Russia's Past

http://www.nti.org/e_research/profil...cal/index.html

excerpt:
Soviet BW activities took root in the late 1920s, with the early Soviet BW facilities developing antipersonnel BW agents. Most elements of the program were controlled by the Soviet military, including the following facilities: the Scientific Research Institute of Microbiology in Kirov (now Vyatka) Russia; the Center for Military-Technical Problems of Anti-Bacteriological Defense in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), Russia; the Center of Virology in Zagorsk (now Sergiyev Posad), Russia; the Scientific Research Institute of Military Medicine in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia. In addition to those Soviet BW facilities operating on Russian territory, in 1936 the Soviet government established the Open-Air Test Site on Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea, Kazakhstan. Vozrozhdeniye Island became the major proving ground in the Soviet Union for the open-air testing of BW agents developed at various Soviet facilities and was directly operated by the Soviet Ministry of Defense (MOD). The other early Soviet BW facility on Kazakhstani territory was the Scientific Research Agricultural Institute (NISKhI) in Gvardeyskiy settlement, located in Zhambyl Oblast, which worked on microbial agents harmful to livestock and plants. Though formally under the control of the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture, the NISKhI, established in 1958, was also likely supervised by the MOD.
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http://cns.miis.edu/opapers/op1/op1.pdf

excerpt:
other facilities were involved mainly in defensive BW developments. The system of anti-plague research institutes and field monitoring stations under the authority of the Main Directorate of Quarantine Infections of
the USSR Ministry of Health included the Mikrob Scientific Research Anti-Plague Institute in Saratov, the Rostov Anti-Plague Institute, the Volgograd Scientific Research Anti-Plague Institute, and the Irkutsk Anti-
Plague Institute for Siberia and the Far East.19
These institutes were mainly responsible for civilian epidemiological investigations and did not have direct links with MOD or Biopreparat
BW facilities.20 As follows from the example of the Anti-Plague Scientific Research Institute in Alma-Ata (now Almaty), however, the antiplague
institutes developed vaccines and diagnostic materials for microbial pathogens modified by the military. Moreover, given the exchange of top-ranking specialists between the anti-plague institutes and offensive BW facilities, their participation in some offensive BW programs cannot be ruled out. For example, Igor Domradskiy, the deputy chairman of the Interagency Council and a founder of Biopreparat, had previously headed
the anti-plague institutes in Irkutsk and Rostovon-Don.

20 The network of Anti-Plague Institutes could provide
assistance to MOD conventional forces by monitoring
outbreaks of natural endemic diseases in the areas where
troops were stationed.

Anti-Plague Scientific Research Institute

The Anti-Plague Scientific Research Institute was established in 1949 in the suburbs of Almaty under the authority of the Main Directorate for Quarantine Infections of the USSR Ministry of Health. It was part of the
Soviet system for the control of highly pathogenic diseases and operated a Central Asian network of 19 epidemiological monitoring stations.89 During the Soviet era, the Anti-Plague Institute employed about 450
people. The institute had four laboratories, including one devoted to genetic research, and a vaccine preparation plant with a capacity of
21 million vaccine doses per year. The institute developed diagnostic tests and vaccines for several infectious diseases, including anthrax,
plague, tularemia, brucellosis, cholera, and listeria. In addition to serving civilian needs, the institute was involved in military-related research and development on defensive measures against BW agents. To this end, the
institute received Soviet intelligence on biological agents developed by Western militaries, including pathogenic strains modified for military purposes, and prepared vaccines and diagnostic preparations against them.
The Almaty Anti-Plague Institute had no direct links with the BW research centers under the Soviet MOD, the Ministry of Agriculture,
or Biopreparat, although it participated in exchanges of scientists and of technical knowledge.90 Nevertheless, the possibility that the Anti-Plague Institute was involved in offensive BW developments cannot be ruled
out.91 In 1992, Moscow terminated funding for the institute’s research and all military-related work ceased.

89 About 1,600 square kilometers of Kazakhstani territory,
mostly located in Kzylorda and Atyrau Oblasts, contain
endemic plague areas. Interview with Dr. Alim Aykimbayev,
Deputy Director of the Anti-Plague Institute, Almaty, October
1998.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid.