Lab 257

Michael C. Carroll

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061842894
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Enfermedades infecciosas

Strictly off limits to the public, Plum Island is home to virginal beaches, cliffs, forests, ponds -- and the deadliest germs that have ever roamed the planet. Lab 257 blows the lid off the stunning true nature and checkered history of Plum Island. It shows that the seemingly bucolic island in the shadow of New York City is a ticking biological time bomb that none of us can safely ignore.

Based on declassified government documents, in-depth interviews, and access to Plum Island itself, this is an eye-opening, suspenseful account of a federal government germ laboratory gone terribly wrong. For the first time, Lab 257 takes you deep inside this secret world and presents startling revelations on virus outbreaks, biological meltdowns, infected workers, the periodic flushing of contaminated raw sewage into area waters, and the insidious connections between Plum Island, Lyme disease, and the deadly West Nile virus. The book also probes what's in store for Plum Island's new owner, the Department of Homeland Security, in this age of bioterrorism.

Lab 257 is a call to action for those concerned with protecting present and future generations from preventable biological catastrophes.

PART 1

OUTBREAKS

1

1975: The Lyme Connection

Dear Ann,

Have you ever heard of Lyme disease? I am writing this letter because I know you can help thousands of people by warning them about this awful sickness. I have been battling it for 18 months.

Frankly I am not doing well.

It would be impossible for me to describe the emotional and physical pain that I have been through. I am a 42-year-old man, married nearly 20 years, and have a family. The days of slinging a 100-pound sack of bird-seed over my shoulder and walking to the backyard are over.

Today I can’t even lift a five-pound sack of flour. There was a time when I could play nine musical instruments. I sang in the church choir and ran my own small business. Today, I do none of the above. I am saving all my energy to fight Lyme disease.

The treatment costs are staggering. IV antibiotic therapy runs from $150 to $475 a treatment…. We have already taken out a third mortgage on our home. Had I been aware of the symptoms from the beginning, I could have had $15 worth of oral antibiotics and that would have done the job.

Thank you, Ann, for allowing me to try to help others.

—S.J.N., Mattituck, N.Y.

Protecting a nuclear power plant is no small task. When it opened in the 1980s, the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island’s North Shore boasted a 175-man militia equipped with Uzi 9-millimeters, AR-15 assault rifles, and 12-gauge shotguns. This elite paramilitary unit patrolled the “protected area,” a dense forest hundreds of acres deep that buffered the “controlled area,” a huge concrete dome sheltering the uranium nuclear reactor. Every eight hours, a fresh detachment of fifty men, armed to the teeth and clad in steel-toed boots, tan pants, and khaki shirts, marched in lockstep through the protected area along dirt paths and through marshes, their watchful eyes and ears continually scanning for intruders. One Shoreham security officer, a short, blond-bearded, barrel-chested man, remembers the scene during the 3:00 P.M. to 11:00 P.M. shift in October 1987. His platoon had just moved out, marching into a field where they often spotted herds of thirty or forty wild deer darting ahead of them into the wooded glen. He felt a brief pinch on his left ankle and thought it was the stiff new Army boots he was breaking in. Later that night, he went home and showered. Pulling off his white tube socks, he noticed a small red mark on his ankle. Those damn boots, he thought, and went to bed.

When he awoke the next morning, the nagging blister had grown, so he grabbed tweezers from the bathroom vanity and poked at the area. Suddenly, something started to move, and he realized it wasn’t a blister at all. It was a live bug. Panicked, he frantically dug into it. As he extracted the critter, it broke in two, spilling its insides into the microscopic holes it punched into his body.

Seventy-two hours later, he thought he had caught the flu. Within a week, his joints began to ache.

Most people don’t think of deer as swimmers. But swim they do. Indigenous to most of the United States and Canada, white-tailed deer can swim distances as long as four miles.

Their natural predators—wolf, bear, mountain lion, and coyote—are long extinct from the northeastern landscape, but one tiny foe remains. Poised atop a blade of grass, the deer tick waits patiently for anything warm-blooded to brush by, feeding on deer as well as smaller creatures like birds and mice. The tick jumps aboard and pierces its sharp mouth hooks into the skin of its unlucky host. A tiny glutton with a king-sized appetite, the tick sucks the blood of its host in a feast that can last up to two whole days, while it swells to a bubble over three times its original size. At the same time, the little parasite deposits its own fluids into the host, fluids that sometimes prove fatal.

The feeding habits of ticks and the swimming abilities of deer were of little concern to the residents of Old Lyme, Connecticut, in July 1975. This quaint New England town is, for the most part, an upper-crust community with tree-lined streets and fine colonial and Federal-style homes. As one of America’s oldest towns, founded by English Puritans, Old Lyme was enjoying its tricentennial as the nation prepared for a bicentennial. But a strange set of occurrences that year would forever change its reputation from a warm, charming enclave to a place of fear and despair.

Old Lyme, nestled on the banks of the Connecticut River, sits just a shade north of the Long Island Sound. The midsummer weather in 1975 was typical for coastal Connecticut—hot, sticky, and humid. As little ones frolicked in the sun, ignoring the blistering heat, and grown-ups sought refuge on their porches by night, grateful for a balmy summer breeze, Polly Murray and Judith Mensch noticed something unusual about their children. Seemingly out of nowhere, they were showing signs of strange physical and mental ailments. Alarmed, the two mothers quickly phoned their neighbors, who were observing strikingly similar conditions in their own children. Many of the kids in the neighborhood—and some adults—were suffering from the same skin rashes, throbbing headaches, and painful swollen joints.

Together, Polly and Judith brought their concerns to the Connecticut Department of Health, which immediately appointed physicians from Yale University to investigate. Initially, the doctors misdiagnosed thirty-nine children and twelve adults with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, a condition they named “Lyme arthritis,” after the town where the strange outbreak occurred. Two years later, scientists linked Lyme arthritis to the bite of a deer tick. And in 1981, Dr. Wally Burgdorfer, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, discovered a thin spiral bacteria—in technical terms, a spirochete—immersed in the fluid of a deer tick. He proved that the new spirochete was to blame—not for a Lyme arthritis, but for an entirely new ailment: Lyme disease.

Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb), named in honor of its discoverer, attacks humans in a number of ways, which is one reason why it remains difficult to diagnose. Characterized by symptoms such as facial paralysis and stiff swelling in the neck and joints, Bb also causes maladies like meningitis and encephalitis—both swellings of the brain—and cardiac problems, including atrioventricular block, myopericarditis, and cardiomegaly. Because Bb attacks the body’s central nervous system, additional symptoms of Lyme disease include acute headaches, general fatigue, fever, moodiness, and depression.

That brief pinch the nuclear power plant trooper felt on his ankle that afternoon was the bite of an enemy no larger than the period at the end of this sentence. The chance of finding something that size, even had it attached to his exposed forearm, was pretty slim. The foe was either a eight-legged nymph deer tick or a Lone Star tick, swelling up to one hundred times its size with his blood. And while it sipped away, the tick regurgitated hundreds of spiral-shaped Bb bacteria into the victim’s blood.

The tick is the perfect germ vector, which is why it has long been fancied as a germ weapon by early biowarriors from Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan to the Soviet Union and the United States. Fixing its target by sensing exhaled carbon dioxide, the creature grabs onto a mammal’s skin with its legs and digs in with its mouth hooks. The tick secretes saliva that helps glue it to its host, making it difficult to separate. A special hormone in the tick counteracts antibodies sent by the host to fight it off, and the crafty tick secretes an anti-inflammatory to prevent itching—so the host hardly knows it’s there.

If the tick is the perfect germ messenger, then Bb is an incredibly clever germ. Because its outside wall is hard to destroy, the bacterium can fight off immune responses and antibiotic drugs. Bb finds a home in the mouth and salivary glands of larvae and nymph ticks, and infects females’ ovaries and the thousands of eggs they will lay after breeding while attached to deer (upon which Bb has little effect). Common in mice and birds as well, today there are five subspecies of Bb and over one hundred mutated substrains in the United States.

The question that experts haven’t been able to answer is why this disease suddenly surfaced in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in the summer of 1975.

PROJECT PAPERCLIP MEETS PLUM ISLAND

“I do not believe that we should offer any guarantees to protection in the post-hostilities period to Germans…. Among them may be some who should properly be tried for war crimes or at least arrested for active participation in Nazi activities….”

—PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT (1944)

“To the victors belong the spoils of the enemy.”

—U.S. SENATOR WILLIAM L. MARCY (1832)

Dr. C. A. Mitchell began his remarks at the 1956 Plum Island dedication day by reminiscing on the late world war:

I often think and almost tremble at what could have taken place had our Teutonic enemies been more alive to this. It is said that some of their scientists pointed out the advantages to be obtained from the artificial sowing of disease agents that attack domestic animals. Fortunately blunders existed in the Teutonic camp as in our own. Consequently, this means of attack was looked upon as a scientific poppy dream…. If [as much] time and money were invested in biologic agent dispersion as in one bomber plane, the Free World would have almost certainly gone down to defeat.

The audience murmured in acknowledgment, but one dedication day VIP stirred uncomfortably—the director of the new virus laboratory in Tübingen, West Germany, personally invited by Plum Island Director Maurice S. “Doc” Shahan. The mind of the brown-haired man with the scar on his face and upper lip held a dark secret. He sat there perspiring, staring at Dr. Mitchell through his gray-brown eyes, wondering how many people knew his past.

For he—Dr. Erich Traub—was that “Teutonic enemy.”

Strangely enough, he had every right to be there. He was one of Plum Island’s founding fathers.

Nearing the end of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union raced to recruit German scientists for postwar purposes. Under a top-secret program code-named Project PAPERCLIP, the U.S. military pursued Nazi scientistific talent “like forbidden fruit,” bringing them to America under employment contracts and offering them full U.S. citizenship. The recruits were supposed to be nominal participants in Nazi activities. But the zealous military recruited more than two thousand scientists, many of whom had dark Nazi party pasts.¹

American scientists viewed these Germans as peers, and quickly forgot they were on opposite sides of a ghastly global war in which millions perished. Fearing brutal retaliation from the Soviets for the Nazis’ vicious treatment of them, some scientists cooperated with the Americans to earn amnesty. Others played the two nations off each other to get the best financial deal in exchange for their services. Dr. Erich Traub was trapped on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain after the war, and ordered to research germ warfare viruses for the Russians. He pulled off a daring escape with his family to West Berlin in 1949. Applying for Project PAPER-CLIP employment, Traub affirmed he wanted to “do scientific work in the U.S.A., become an American citizen, and be protected from Russian reprisals.”

As lab chief of Insel Riems—a secret Nazi biological warfare laboratory on a crescent-shaped island nestled in the Baltic Sea—Traub worked directly for Adolf Hitler’s second-in-charge, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, on live germ trials. He packaged weaponized foot-and-mouth disease virus, which was dispersed from a Luftwaffe bomber onto cattle and reindeer in occupied Russia. At Himmler’s request, Traub personally journeyed to the Black Sea coast of Turkey. There, amid the lush Anatolian terrain, he searched for a lethal strain of rinderpest virus for use against the Allies. Earlier in the war he had been a captain in the German Army, working as an expert on infectious animal diseases, particularly in horses. His veterinary corps led the germ warfare attacks on horses in the United States and Romania in World War I with a bacteria called glanders. He was also a member of NSKK, the Nazi Motorists Corps, a powerful Nazi organization that ranked directly behind the SA (Storm Troopers) and the SS (Elite Corps). In fact, NSKK’s first member, joining in April 1930, was Adolf Hitler himself. Traub also listed his 1930s membership in Amerika-Deutscher Volksbund, a German-American “club” also known as Camp Sigfried. Just thirty miles west of Plum Island in Yaphank, Long Island, Camp Sigfried was the national headquarters of the American Nazi movement. Over forty thousand people throughout the New York region arrived by train, bus, and car to participate in Nuremberg-like rallies. Each weekend they marched in lockstep divisions, carrying swastika flags, burning Jewish U.S. congressmen in effigy, and singing anti-Semitic songs. Above all, they solemnly pledged their allegiance to Hitler and the Third Reich.

Ironically, Traub spent the prewar period of his scientific career on a fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, perfecting his skills in viruses and bacteria under the tutelage of American experts before returning to Nazi Germany on the eve of war. Despite Traub’s troubling war record, the U.S. Navy recruited him for its scientific designs, and stationed him at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.²

Just months into his PAPERCLIP contract, the germ warriors of Fort Detrick, the Army’s biological warfare headquarters in Frederick, Maryland, and CIA operatives invited Traub in for a talk, later reported in a declassified top-secret summary:

Dr. Traub is a noted authority on viruses and diseases in Germany and Europe. This interrogation revealed much information of value to the animal disease program from a Biological Warfare point of view. Dr. Traub discussed work done at a German animal disease station during World War II and subsequent to the war when the station was under Russian control.³

Traub’s detailed explanation of the secret operation on Insel Riems, and his activities there during the war and for the Soviets, laid the groundwork for Fort Detrick’s offshore germ warfare animal disease lab on Plum Island. Traub was a founding father.

Little is publicly available about his clandestine activities for the U.S. military. The names of two studies, “Experiments with Chick Embryo Adapted Foot-and-mouth Disease” and “Studies on In-vitro Multiplication of Newcastle Disease Virus in Chicken Blood,” were made available under the Freedom of Information Act, but the research reports themselves (and many others) were withheld. With his “laboratory assistant” Anne Burger, who came over in 1951, Traub experimented with over forty lethal viruses on large test animals.⁴

Traub also spent time at the USDA laboratories in Beltsville, Maryland, where he isolated a new weapons-grade virus strain in the USDA lab. Studying a virulent strain of a new virus that caused human infections, Traub showed how it adapted “neurotropically” in humans by voraciously attacking nerve and brain tissues. This was the same potent virus that infected a human in Plum Island’s first-ever germ experiment one year later.

By 1953, West Germany recognized a need for its own Insel Riems and built a high-containment virus facility in Tübingen. They asked Dr. Erich Traub to return to the Fatherland and assume command. Permission was granted. But there was a catch. “In view of Dr. Traub’s eminence as an international authority and the recognizable military potentialities in the possible application of his specialty, it is recommended that future surveillance in appropriate measure be maintained after the specialist’s return to Germany.” In other words, the CIA would be tailing him for years. As soon as the lab opened for business, he turned to Plum Island for starter strains of viruses, which ...