Sverdlovsk anthrax leak

On 2 April 1979, spores of Bacillus anthracis (the causative agent of anthrax) were accidentally released from a Soviet military research facility in the city of Sverdlovsk, Soviet Union (now Yekaterinburg, Russia). The ensuing outbreak of the disease resulted in the deaths of at least 68 people, although the exact number of victims remains unknown. The cause of the outbreak was denied for years by the Soviet authorities, which blamed the deaths on consumption of tainted meat from the area, and subcutaneous exposure due to butchers handling the tainted meat. The accident was the first major indication in the Western world that the Soviet Union had embarked upon an offensive programme aimed at the development and large-scale production of biological weapons. Sverdlovsk had been a major production center of the Soviet military-industrial complex since World War II. By the 1970s, 87 per cent of the city's industrial production was military; only 13 per cent for public consumption. It produced tanks, ballistic missiles, rockets and other armaments. The city has at times been referred to as Russia's Pittsburgh because of its large steelmaking industry. During the Cold War, Sverdlovsk became a Soviet "closed city" to which travel was restricted for foreigners. The biological warfare (BW) facility in Sverdlovsk was built during the period 1947 to 1949 and was a spin-off of the Soviet Union's main military BW facility in Kirov. It was allocated the former site of the Cherkassk-Sverdlovsk Infantry Academy in Sverdlovsk on Ulitsa Zvezdnaya, 1, and abutted the southern industrialised sector of the city. The new facility, known as the USSR Ministry of Defence's Scientific-Research Institute of Hygiene, became operational on 19 July 1949. Alibek suggests that the construction of the institute incorporated technologies which had been gleaned from captured scientists who had participated in the Japanese biological warfare programme. Research was initiated at Sverdlovsk on bacterial pathogens including Bacillus anthracis.