Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak (review)

Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak. By Jeanne Guillemin (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999) 321 pp. $27.50.

Guillemin's Anthrax is an interesting document. Its subject is an apparent outbreak of anthrax at Sverdlovsk, USSR, in 1979. The USSR acknowledged the outbreak, which it linked to tainted meat, but decades later, several American scientists and social scientists were disturbed by rumors that victims numbered in the thousands (the Soviets put the death total at sixty-four. The CIA set the figures in thousands of deaths and in kilograms of anthrax spores. Echoes of Chernobyl could be heard. Also fueling suspicions was the Persian Gulf War. Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons on civilian populations and actively manufactured anthrax as one of his weapons of mass destruction. Could the Soviets have done the same? Was there an anthrax disaster to rival Chernobyl? Was the soil around Sverdlovsk poisoned for long periods? Was the Soviet military, which had signed a treaty pledging not to employ biological weaponry under any circumstance, in violation of that agreement? There are the questions that Guillemin's multidisciplinary team sought to answer during the early 1990s, taking full advantage of the relative openness of Russian society immediately following the fall of communism.

A straightforward narrative would have been stimulating, but Guillemin took every opportunity to dress it up: Persons punctuate sentences by looking at the floor; conversations end abruptly; tears well up. In Guillemin's account, even nuances are nuanced. Personalities, lunches, meetings, and the like are given weight equal to demographic data, autopsy records, and interviews. The only thing missing in this medico-historical soap opera is sex.

Sprinkled in the volume are a series of mini-essays on topics near to Guillemin's heart. She waxes about the moral implications surrounding the loss of even one life, the problems of working and living under authoritarian regimes, militarism versus popularly elected government, humanity's inhumanity, and a whole slew of other like topics. At the same time, she is aware of the requirement that persons document their assumptions--as she might say, that persons prove things scientifically. That dualism offers a sense of dissonance in the volume. Her essays are often treated as her "facts," creating a sense that she is unable to separate her opinions from what she can document or, worse yet, that her opinions are inconvertible because they are self-evident.

The author's manipulations are a shame because the volume is a fine example of the use of historical sources--interviews, death certificates, burial records, and tombstones--as well as medical data to resolve what is, in final analysis, a medical mystery. It likely was not poisoned meat that caused the outbreak but the discharge into the atmosphere of a small amount of anthrax--apparently by accident or technological failure--at a top-secret military base. The leak was so small that it was consonant with research on how to prevent anthrax outbreaks, especially when some foreign agent or power sought to employ them as weapons. Though by no means able to rule out every other possibility, the research team found the preponderance of evidence to support a theory more benign that initial speculations. The outbreak was small and relatively contained, and the Soviet medical establishment pursued its amelioration apace. Their public declaration of sixty-four deaths nearly matched the total uncovered by the American-based research team.

Alan I Marcus
Iowa State University

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