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#5
Newsday
November 4, 2001
World's Largest Anthrax Burial Ground
Many fear germ will be carried from Uzbek island

By Liam Pleven
Staff Correspondent

Moynaq, Uzbekistan -- The rusted trawlers sprawled atop sand dunes mark the surreal spot here where a port thrived decades ago, before the Aral Sea began a retreat that has helped transform this remote corner of Central Asia into a landscape of desolation.

The shore of the Aral is now dozens of miles north of this small community, over the barren former seabed.

The parched expanse beyond the abandoned boats now evokes a new threat in the wake of the anthrax cases in the United States.

As the Aral contracts, according to officials, it is gradually exposing a land bridge to Vozrozhdeniye Island, where the Soviet Union tested biological weapons for decades. In 1988 the Soviet military buried its stocks of anthrax -- tons of powder containing the deadly spores -- in pits on the island.

The exposure of Renaissance Island has highlighted the danger that the anthrax could be freed from its grave, either unwittingly by animals or intentionally by terrorists. In hopes of eliminating that risk, the United States signed a deal Oct. 22 with Uzbekistan to spend up to $6 million cleaning up Renaissance Island.

Even as American officials remain baffled about the source of the anthrax that has turned the U.S. mail into a weapon-delivery system, experts generally consider it unlikely that anyone could extract anthrax from Renaissance Island, because it is so difficult to reach and the actual burial sites remain secret.

"There's not some big sign that says, ‘300 yards from here, you dig,'” said Milton Leitenberg, a senior fellow at the Center for International Studies at the University of Maryland, who has studied the case.

But there is evidence that scavengers have been on the island in the past decade, people from this impoverished region who looted from the abandoned Soviet-era test facility things like military equipment and corrugated metal that could be sold in the market.

"The Aral Sea is becoming smaller,” said Yusuf Shadimetov, the president of Ecosan, an Uzbek environmental group. "So there is a big need to destroy anything on this island that could be dangerous.”

And the emerging land bridge has enhanced the threat, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher noted last month.

"It's important to clean up facilities everywhere, but particularly somewhere that was a little more isolated in the past,” he said of Renaissance Island. "The priority rises when it gets attached.”

Renaissance Island for decades was the testing site for Soviet efforts to turn anthrax into a weapon. That program was responsible for a 1979 outbreak of anthrax that is the deadliest on record, according to experts.

The outbreak occurred in the Urals region city of Sverdlovsk, now Yekaterinburg. A plume of anthrax spores was accidentally released from a secret military center manufacturing them, according to Jeanne Guillemin, a senior fellow at the Security Studies Program at MIT and the author of a book on the incident. A missing air filter was believed to be responsible, and aerosolized anthrax drifted over the city.

"It's very easy to inhale that deeply into the lungs,” Guillemin said.

In the days that followed, about 5,000 people were exposed and at least 64 died, while many others were infected but recovered, according to people who have studied the case. The full medical records have never been released, Guillemin said.

Renaissance Island was used as a testing site from 1952 until the Soviet Union's collapse 40 years later, not only for anthrax but also for plague, typhus, smallpox and other biological agents, according to a 1998 report by the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies.

While Soviet specialists tried to kill the anthrax with bleach before burying it, some of the microscopic spores are believed to have survived. The island's arid soil provides ideal conditions to preserve them, and while anthrax dies when exposed to the ultraviolet light of the sun, it can endure for decades underground.

"It's just waiting for the next grazing animal,” Guillemin said.

If animals are able to reach or depart the island over a land bridge, the danger increases. The 1998 report noted that "burrowing rodents such as gophers, field mice and marmots are natural hosts of plague and other pathogens and can migrate over long distances spreading infectious disease.”

Thirty years ago, such a land bridge would have been unthinkable. Oral Ataniyazova, director of the pediatric hospital in the regional capital, Nukus, remembers swimming in the Aral Sea as a teenager. In Moynaq, locals say the waters were about 75 feet deep not far offshore before Soviet irrigation policies began depriving the sea of water from the Amu and Syr rivers.

Now, the Aral Sea has long since departed Moynaq, and far to the north, Renaissance Island has dramatically increased in size. There are various accounts of the conditions at the now-distant seashore near the island, but it appears clear that if a land bridge does not exist, it will soon.

Still, it is not easy to get that far, according to residents. On a recent visit to Moynaq, a day after a strong storm announced impending winter, locals refused to undertake the five-hour journey to the shore, citing the risk of getting trapped on the rugged Aral Sea bed. The trip is safer earlier in the year, one person said, but even then, two or three four-wheel-drive vehicles are required in case one gets stuck. Residents said such vehicles were not available in Moynaq.

Once on the island, somebody searching for the anthrax would have to hike or drive farther north and then know precisely where to look.

"Theoretically, of course, it's possible,” said Dastan Eleukenov, a co-author of the 1998 report and executive director of the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies office in Almaty, Kazakhstan. But in practice, he added, it would be a difficult task.

As for accidental infections from the island, doctors who work in Nukus say they have never seen a case of anthrax locally. The Karakalpakstan region has many serious health problems, including tuberculosis at a rate many times higher than in the United States and several types of cancer.

But Ataniyazova, the head of the pediatric center in Nukus, said the causes are mostly linked to poverty and the presence of pesticides and other chemicals in the air and water -- a result of Soviet-designed agricultural policies in a region where about 80 percent of the people make their living from farming.

Those policies -- intensive use of chemicals and irrigation to grow cotton in the drylands along the Amu and Syr rivers -- are the ones that have devastated the Aral Sea.

When asked about going to the island, Yusup Kamalov, the head of a group in Nukus called the Union for the Defense of the Aral Sea, replied, "Sorry. Thank you very much. It would be better to go to New York, even.”

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