IV.

History

One of the oldest known diseases, anthrax was once epidemic and still appears in many areas of the world. It was the first infectious disease for which scientists isolated the causative organism. French parasitologist C. J. Davaine first saw the rod-shaped organisms under a microscope in the blood of infected sheep in 1850. German bacteriologist Robert Koch demonstrated in 1876 that the disease occurred when spores of Bacillus anthracis were injected into mice. French biologist Louis Pasteur also demonstrated that the bacteria caused the disease and in 1881 developed an effective vaccine against anthrax in animals.

The worst outbreak of anthrax occurred in 1979, when a biological weapons plant in Sverdlovsk, Russia (present-day Yekaterinburg), accidentally released airborne anthrax spores, killing 66 people. In 1998 American scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used newly developed techniques to determine that the spores released in the accident contained at least four different strains of anthrax. This raised concerns that Russia, and possibly other countries, were working on a vaccine-resistant form of anthrax for use as a biological weapon.

During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, about 150,000 members of the armed services were vaccinated against anthrax because of fears that Iraq had been developing biological weapons. The United States Department of Defense later approved a program to vaccinate members of the armed forces stationed in the Middle East. Cases of inhaled anthrax were reported in several states in the United States in 2001. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation quickly became involved in investigating the cause of these cases because they followed closely after terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.