Fortunately, anything spread at those alltitudes will disperese to
widely to have much if any affect on people on the ground. But, what
fuels these "Consperacies" are actual once Secret Government
experiments like this one, it makes people wonder if THE Government
is still doing this.

oso


http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?
file=/chronicle/archive/2004/10/31/MNG149JERH1.DTL

--------------------------------------------------------

Serratia has dark history in region
Army test in 1950 may have changed microbial ecology
Bernadette Tansey, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, October 31, 2004


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Flu Vaccine
Chiron found bad flu vaccine in July (11/18)

More flu vaccine arriving in state (11/18)

New study finds one-fifth of normal dose is just as good (11/4)

Vaccine dearth prompts SF doctor to import his own supply (11/2)

U.S. ill-prepared to handle bioterror attack, experts (11/1)

Tainted flu vaccine could have been a health nightmare (10/31)

Serratia has dark history in region (10/31)

Scarce flu vaccine not designed for new strain (10/24)

Companies finding alternatives to protect workers (10/23)

No flu vaccine shortage on Capitol Hill (10/20)

FDA looking at Canadian supplier for flu vaccine (10/19)

Doctors warn of flu shot 'disaster' (10/19)

Canada may have 2 million extra doses (10/18)

Problems have beset flu program for years (10/17)

Vaccine hopefuls get shot of reality (10/17)

Seniors turned away after waiting hours in line (10/16)

FDA says all of Chiron's vaccine is unusable (10/16)

Woman dies in flu shot queue (10/15)

With scarce supplies, prices go up -- way up (10/13)

Feds to help state with flu vaccine (10/13)

Interactive guide to fighting the flu (10/13)

Vaccine problem was not in open (10/12)

Rush is on for flu vaccine -- long lines form (10/11)

State orders flu shots saved for the weakest (10/9)

The best ways to avoid the flu (10/9)

Healthy folks snagging flu shots (10/7)

6 million doses of suspect vaccine in U.S. warehouses (10/7)

Pender: Feverish days ahead at work (10/7)

Flu vaccine supply halved; voluntary rationing urged (10/6)

Determining who's the neediest (10/6)

Vaccine ruling hammers Chiron shares (10/6)

Q&A: Most at-risk should be able to get shots (10/5)







Serratia is a bacterium that some doctors and residents of the Bay
Area have been familiar with for many years.

In 1950, government officials believed that serratia did not cause
disease. That belief was later used as a justification for a secret
post-World War II Army experiment that became a notorious disaster
tale about the microbe.

The Army used serratia to test whether enemy agents could launch a
biological warfare attack on a port city such as San Francisco from a
location miles offshore.

For six days in late September 1950, a small military vessel near San
Francisco sprayed a huge cloud of serratia particles into the air
while the weather favored dispersal.

Then the Army went looking to find out where it landed. Serratia is
known for forming bright red colonies when a soil or water sample is
streaked on a culture medium -- a property that made it ideal for the
bio-warfare experiment.

Army tests showed that the bacterial cloud had exposed hundreds of
thousands of people in a broad swath of Bay Area communities
including Sausalito, Albany, Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro, San
Francisco, Daly City and Colma, according to reports that later were
declassified. Soon after the spraying, 11 people came down with hard-
to-treat infections at the old Stanford University Hospital in San
Francisco. By November, one man had died. Edward Nevin, 75, a retired
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. worker recovering from a prostate
operation, had succumbed to an infection with Serratia marcescens
that attacked his heart valves.

The outbreak was so unusual that the Stanford doctors wrote it up for
a medical journal. But the medics and Nevin's relatives didn't find
out about the Army experiment for nearly 26 years, when a series of
secret military experiments came to light.

The Chronicle's David Perlman, who reported on the revelations in
1976, found no evidence that the Army had alerted health authorities
before it blanketed the region with bacteria. As the news surfaced,
doctors started wondering whether the Army experiment that seeded the
Bay Area with serratia two decades earlier might be responsible for
heart valve infections then cropping up as well as serious infections
seen among intravenous drug users in the '60s and '70s, said Dr. Lee
Riley, a professor of infectious disease at UC Berkeley.

Before the 1950 experiment, serratia was not a common environmental
bacteria in the Bay Area nor did it frequently cause hospital
infections, Riley said.

Some people now speculate that descendants of the Army germs are
still causing infections here today, he said. The secret bio-warfare
test might have permanently changed the microbial ecology of the
region, the theory goes. But to prove it, researchers would need to
take a DNA fingerprint of the Army strain for comparison with today's
microbes.

In 2001, Serratia marcescens surfaced again as the culprit behind
another fatal public health crisis in the Bay Area. Patients were
coming down with a painful, hard-to-treat form of meningitis. Public
health experts traced the infection to Doc's Pharmacy in Walnut
Creek, which mixed some of its own drug products, a legal practice.

At Doc's, investigators found numerous sources of potential
contamination -- some stemming from lapses in sterile procedures
others from a bubbling tropical fish tank -- in the area where the
drug formulas were handled. Among the preparations Doc's had sold was
a form of cortisone injected into the spines of dozens of patients
with back pain.

One of those patients, a healthy, 47-year-old Concord man named
George Stahl, died the day after his injection. At first, doctors
believed that the death was due to a burst blood vessel. It wasn't
discovered until his autopsy that he had died from a massive serratia
infection.

In the meantime, more patients had received the contaminated shots.
Doctors raced to identify and treat them. In the end, of the 38
people dosed with antibiotics, three people died and 10 were
hospitalized.


-----------------------------------------------------------
Serratia marcescens: History of trouble
The bacteria behind the loss of half this year's U.S. flu vaccine
supply is Serratia marcescens, whose characteristic red colonies are
shown here under the microscope.

1950: In a secret germ warfare experiment, the Army sprays a vast
cloud of Serratiamarcescens over the Bay Area from a vessel in waters
off San Francisco. The bacteria blanketed the city and surrounding
communities in a circle from Sausalito through the East Bay to Colma.

1950: Shortly after the spraying, 11 patients at the old Stanford
University Hospital in San Francisco develop unusually tough
infections, and one dies. Serratia destroyed theheart valves of
Edward Nevin, 75.

1976: The Army experiment is made public. Nevin's son Edward Nevin
Jr. learns his father's death may have been caused by the secret
test. Doctors wonder whether the Army germs established a microbial
population that caused other infections in the 1960s and1970s.

2001: Meningitis outbreak after Serratia marcescens contaminates
spinal injections prepared by Doc's Pharmacy in Walnut Creek. Three
die and 10 hospitalized among the 38 treated.

2004: Emeryville biotechnology firm Chiron Corp.'s stock dives when
its entire store of flu vaccine, made in England, is declared unsafe
due to contamination with Serratia marcescens.

Sources: Michigan State University Communication Technology Lab,
MicrobeZoo, Project. Shirley Owens and Catherine McGowan; text by
Bernadette Tansey



--- In CaNdY-for-the-BrAiN@yahoogroups.com, "ram" <rampagepage@y...>
wrote:
> Why are military aircraft dusting our air with strange substances?
> This sounds paranoid in the extreme, but having heard and read
about
> the phenomenon for years I've been observing it regularly myself
for
> over twelve months.
> Jets crisscrossing the skies leaving long contrails behind them
were
> a common sight in the unregulated and over-polluted 1950s and `60s.
> Later regulations brought the contrails down to size – except for
> military jets, which were exempted from pollution control laws. For
a
> while I believed that the long contrails I've observed all up and
> down the coastal fringe of eastern Australia were the result of
> military jets at high, cold altitudes – despite the fact that the
> white trails extended from one side of the horizon to the other
and,
> rather than slowly disappearing, spread out as they fell until they
> were a haze filling the landscape around the populated coastal
region.
> On closer observation, sometimes with binoculars, sometimes
telephoto
> lenses and also with the unaided eye, it was obvious that the
normal
> pair of jet exhausts were present for the normal short distance
> behind the aircraft – while between them a non-continuous series of
> discrete puffs was joining into what has come to be known as a
long,
> white `chemtrail', slowly falling to the ground. Internet searches
> will reveal many interpretations of what's being sprayed on us all
by
> these military jets. As we hear nothing official about them, it's
> hard to believe they're serving any benign purpose.
> See http://www.rense.com/politics6/chemdatapage.html ,
> http://www.carnicom.com/contrails.htm , or
> http://www.nmsr.org/chemtrls.htm for more information - and
> photographs.
> Has anyone seen these chemtrails? Please leave a location and
> description if you have.