Across Elwood Drive from Iowa State University’s football stadium, home to a team that has enjoyed unusual success this autumn at wiping out opponents, stands the College of Veterinary Science, which annihilated a very different sort of foe last week — and did it with a thoroughness that would draw a standing ovation from one of Saturday afternoon’s gridiron crowds.
The object of this hush-hush exercise, carried out using precautions extraordinary even on a campus where hazardous organisms and chemicals are routinely stored and studied, was the university’s anthrax supply.
Iowa State has become firmly associated in the public mind with anthrax, in part because it was among the first places to isolate the causative microbe, has studied it for 75 years, and has given its name to what is thought to be the strain used in the recent spate of bioterrorism.
ISU’s anthrax eradication took place 10 days ago, or shortly after anthrax began spilling out of envelopes sent to legislators and the media. “The spores we had were as dead as dead could be when we finished,” said David Inyang, superintendent of Environmental Health and Safety for the university. “If this helped calm any fears, then it was worth all the extra effort.”
But while the rest of America focuses on what the next mail delivery might bring, experts at this highly regarded farm research center are more worried about another, arguably more frightening specter: agri-terrorism, or the poisoning of livestock and crops with anthrax, or, for that matter, other dangerous diseases.
Not only could this have a devastating effect on the food we eat and our wellness, it could also deliver the double blow of seriously affecting our farm economy.
The Iowa Department of Agriculture, which formed a task force last spring to address preventive measures for the spread of livestock diseases, has expanded its alert since Sept. 11 with a series of warnings to veterinarians, fertilizer dealers and commodity personnel on possible terrorism. A spokesperson said this will be an ongoing exercise, with more measures expected to be put in place.
“The way to cause great panic is to do it with human diseases, which is exactly what the terrorists have been doing,” said Norm Cheville, dean of the ISU veterinary science department. “But the way to really have an impact is to do it to our plants and animals. We need to be more careful of that.”
Concern over crop dusting
Cheville is especially nervous about reports that one terrorist killed in the Sept. 11 strikes had been contacting airfields involved in crop spraying. No link has been made with spreading infectious materials in this manner and, in fact, it is contaminating animals — most likely via their feed supply — that is the scariest thought for agricultural experts here.
“You just have took at England and the terrible problem it’s had with foot-and-mouth disease to see what could happen,” said Dr. James Roth, a microbiologist and professor in ISU’s vet school (the spelling of the veterinary disorder as published has been corrected here and in a subsequent reference in this text). “Only a few animals would have to be infected to spread a disease, so the key is in diagnosing everything at an early stage.”
As one of the leading agricultural schools in the nation, the place where former Vice President Henry A. Wallace went to school and founded Wallaces Farmer magazine and where George Washington Carver was a student and teacher, Iowa State is a major research center in which animal diseases such as anthrax, mad cow, foot-and-mouth, and hog cholera are part of the regular lexicon.
Ever since early news stories identified — erroneously — the anthrax sample that killed a Florida man as having been stolen from an Ames laboratory, the College of Veterinary Science has been dealing with scrutiny unlike anything the football team has attracted across the street. More than 60 publications, including almost every major U.S. newspaper, and a half-dozen TV outlets, have swarmed over the ISU experts since that initial bogus report like a cloud of locusts.
“This is still keeping us very busy, but actually it’s given us a chance to clear up a lot of misunderstanding,” said Cheville. It also fostered the decision to destroy the school’s anthrax supply.
With an Iowa state trooper watching every step of the process, ISU technicians, looking a little like astronauts in their safety outfits, placed vials of the spores into an autoclave, or a radar-, rangelike, high powered, bio-contained cooking device, turned the heat up to 130 degrees Celsius, and left everything to “cook” for 13 hours. The trooper never left the room.
Then, the next morning, the containers and their now-harmless contents were placed in a department incinerator regularly used for destroying everything from diseased cows to toxic waste, and left there for two more hours at a temperature of 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit. The trooper stayed right to the end.
In fact, either of those two steps would have been more than enough to kill the B. anthracis, or anthrax bacilli, one of two stockpiles of the lethal organism in this central Iowa community of 50,000 people. But these are strange times, made even stranger for Ames because of its links to the disease agent being put in the mail by terrorists.
Bowing to pressure
The destruction of the anthrax in Cheville’s department was, as much as anything, a bow to pressure exerted by the state’s public relations-minded governor, Tom Vilsack. The school’s small supply had been unused, but safely locked in storage, for at least 20 years, according to ISU officials.
“This is a teaching institution, first and foremost,” Cheville said, “and so we always are aware of access. The students never, never are in a position to be exposed to anything dangerous like anthrax.”
On the outskirts of Ames, the other known stockpile in the area is kept under lock and key in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Veterinary Services laboratory. Jim Rogers, a USDA spokesman, said nothing has been stolen from labs there. He knew of no plans to destroy what is on hand or move it elsewhere.
Rogers added that the anthrax colonies there are “not a big part of our work,” but that they are necessary for research, tissue-typing and diagnostic purposes.
A lot of misinformation
“It’s an important story and there’s a definite buzz to it in Ames like everywhere else,” said Steve Lekwa, director of the Story County Conservation Board, “but it’s not exactly like we’re all walking around here with gas masks on. There’s a lot of misinformation out there.”
This is also the home of the especially virulent Ames Strain of B. anthracis, which is the form some outside experts believe is being used in the mailings. This undoubtedly has added to misconceptions about the community. Experts here, as they are everywhere else, are anxiously awaiting the FBI’s official assessment of the origins of the mailed bacteria.
“Anthrax has this reputation for producing absolute panic even though it may not be as hazardous as a lot of other choices,” Cheville said. “The critical issue, from a treatment standpoint, is whether it’s the Ames strain or another field strain, or a genetically engineered strain.”
The Ames Strain has been traced to a diseased cow brought to the Iowa State labs in 1980. A blood culture was sent to the USDA laboratory here, which eventually forwarded it to the U.S. Army Infectious Disease Center.
After the sample finally was determined to be a separate strain, it was given the name Ames Strain, simply because of its point of origin. This was not even the strain stored at the university.
“It may have been first discovered in Iowa, but what route it took to get to that Florida newspaper office we don’t know,” said Kevin Teale, a spokesman for the state’s Public Health Department. “Calling it the Ames Strain doesn’t mean what was in the envelope came from Ames.”
Though the USDA wasn’t making any of its Ames area staff available for interviews, one former longtime scientist at its Veterinary Services Laboratory said security at the facility here has been exceptionally tight for the last 10 years or so. “They’ve never been careless, but things used to be a lot looser before they really began clamping down,” he said.
The USDA complex here, which also includes the National Animal Disease Center, does research on other infectious diseases that are in the news. In addition to analyzing a population of sheep thought to have been exposed to mad cow disease that were brought here from Vermont earlier this year, the complex also performed some of the early work on the mosquito-borne West Nile virus, which is making inroads in the U.S.
Worried about the sheep
“To be honest, people [around here] might actually have been more worked up over the sheep than [anthrax],” Teale said. “It actually got down to this: If one of the sheep defecated in the truck on the way here, it dried, turned to dust, and got in the air, would we be in danger? People don’t understand science and a lot of great leaps get made.”
Iowa State experts said it would be a positive development if the mailed strain of anthrax turned out to be the Ames Strain.
“We could deal with it if it’s the Ames Strain, but the scary thing about this is that it might be an engineered strain that just closely resembles one that we already know,” said Cheville of the anthrax being sent through the mail. “If you engineer one that might not be susceptible to penicillin, then that would put us in a bad spot.
“Theoretically, the Russians have already done that and we’re certain Iraq is making it,” he added. “I’ve heard the stuff (U.S. Sen.) Tom Daschle got was especially high-grade, which meant it had to come from four or five sites in the world.”
Difficult for terrorists
Cheville said it would not be easy for a lone terrorist, or even an entire terrorist cell, to manufacture and mail anthrax from, say, a residential location in the U.S.
“You could grow the spores in your kitchen overnight if you wanted,” he said, “but to do that in the quantities to cause real damage would be difficult. You’d have to have a fermentation unit, a dehydration unit, all sorts of industrial-size equipment. It would have to be very dangerous for the people doing it. Eventually you’d get caught.”
Roth said the source of the anthrax can be determined better once the strain is determined. He said if it turns out to be high grade, “weapons” quality, it increases the chances it has been imported from abroad — most likely Iraq.
“How that was done would be anybody’s guess,” he said. “If it’s a cruder quality, that means it is more likely it was made domestically. It wouldn’t be that hard to do, but it would be a very dangerous process.”
Inyang, whose department supervised the destruction of ISU’s anthrax, indicated the threat of biological terrorism has become a top security concern among his peers on other research-oriented campuses, where hazardous materials regularly are used and dangerous diseases studied. “You don’t know what’s coming down the pike next,” he said, in an apparent reference to threats such as smallpox and plague.”
The local Ames police, like law enforcement officials in many cities, have received telephone calls from nervous residents over what they thought were “suspicious-looking envelopes in the mail,” according to Sgt. Mike Johns. They were all false alarms.
Life returns to normal
In Ames, meanwhile, life seemingly goes on for most people without extra nervousness over the community’s ties to terrorism.
“Everyone knows what’s in the news,” said Mavis Butler, an elementary school teacher here. “You can’t help but be aware because of all the attention it’s getting.
“But no one I know is walking around worried about opening their mail or what’s going on in our laboratories. They’re more concerned about whether the football teams win or lose.”
