I was born late-November, 1945, in the San Francisco bay area -- two
months before my fifth birthday, the United States government performed
a little "biological experiment" in my neighborhood, read about it
below.

A month later, my mother, great-grandmother and I all came down with
pneumonia which didn't respond to treatment. Eventually we were
re-diagnosed with "valley fever," an obscure and sometimes fatal illness
particular to the southwest accompanied by rash, fever and lung
problems. One gets this disease by breathing in dust, putting farm and
construction workers and archeologists at risk. Low immune function is
typically a requirement for infection. My family worked at none of
those professions, were healthy prior to infection and did not
live rurally. The disease is not communicable -- every person has to
breath in their own contaminant.

Since we did have family in the San Joaquin Valley, it was supposed that
we had become infected at a family reunion. None of the other members
of the family turned up sick, however, even those who lived in the
area's traditionally at risk. It was well into spring before we came out
of that dark tunnel -- and at the tender age of five, I had scarred
lungs and a chronic respiratory vulnerability which has dogged me all my
life.

I've been told over the years that there was a "rash" of valley fever
victims around that time, with the health community not exactly
johnny-on-the-spot at identifying bacterial strains; VF was evidently a
handy catch-all for that strange little "glitch" in health problems the
bay area suffered.

Ain't that just the cherry on the cake? Yeah, I know that doesn't
"prove" anything -- but maybe it clears up a family mystery. Maybe it
tells us that "what we don't know WILL kill us." And maybe it tells us
that our government is NOT always [or maybe, often] our friend. And
I'll take this occasion to remind you that, despite FDA "suggestions" to
remove it, our
childhood vaccines are all loaded with mercury.

Your faithful lab rat,
Jude


Serratia has dark history in region
Army test in 1950 may have changed microbial ecology
Bernadette Tansey, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, October 31, 2004

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. ++


Tainted flu vaccine could have been a health nightmare
Same bacteria was used in 1950 Bay Area germ-warfare test -- and
high-risk
groups for shots would be most vulnerable
Bernadette Tansey, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, October 31, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/10/31/MNG\
5O9JIJQ1.DTL

Americans may never know how close a Bay Area company came to
distributing a bacteria-tainted flu vaccine, or how much of that vaccine
was contaminated.

What is known is that the bacteria that ruined the stockpile of vaccine
produced by Chiron Corp. was used in a secret germ-warfare experiment in
the Bay Area conducted by the Army and was tied to three deaths in
Contra Costa County in 2001.

The bacteria -- which tainted about half of the nation's flu vaccine
supply -- was once considered a harmless microbe. But a 1950 experiment,
in which a ship off the San Francisco coast let loose clouds of Serratia
marcescens to test whether an enemy could launch a biological warfare
attack from a distance, is now suspected of causing a cluster of
hard-to-treat infections.

Experts say the serratia bacteria can trigger a cascade of
life-threatening illnesses, including heart-valve infections, pneumonia
and septic shock when injected into vulnerable patients.

The bacterium was blamed for a deadly outbreak of meningitis in Contra
Costa County in 2001, which was traced to injected drugs legally mixed
by a Walnut Creek pharmacy.

British regulators pulled the license of Chiron's factory in Liverpool
on Oct. 5 after discovering vaccine tainted with serratia. There had
been problems with sterility at the plant, which Chiron insisted were
confined to a small fraction of the vaccine's inventory. The company was
preparing to ship at least 46 million doses of its product, Fluvirin, to
U.S.
distributors.

Officials at Chiron, which is based in Emeryville, and the Food and Drug
Administration have yet to provide details about how the bacteria
infiltrated the vaccine at Chiron's British manufacturing plant. Nor
have they revealed how much of the live bacteria or its dangerous toxins
werefound in the huge inventory of vaccine doses.

What is known is that serratia can be deadly.

If distributed nationwide, a flu vaccine contaminated with serratia
would become a highly efficient vehicle to deliver the dangerous microbe
into the bodies of people most susceptible to its effects -- the old,
the sick, those with weakened immune systems and small children. That's
the very population most strongly urged by health authorities to get a
flu shot.

"If you injected it, you'd get bacteremia and sepsis," especially in the
people most likely to get the vaccine, said Mary York, a Walnut Creek
consultant and former director of microbiology at UCSF. "It would be
horrible."

People exposed to the bacteria in the air or water are unlikely to
become ill. But injecting it into fragile patients is a different
matter.

The illnesses that could result would be hard to treat because serratia
has a genetic knack for quickly developing resistance to antibiotics,
said Dr.Lee Riley, a professor of infectious disease at UC Berkeley.

The organism is now known to be a frequent culprit behind outbreaks of
infection in hospital patients, who often undergo invasive procedures
such as surgery, intravenous fluid drips and injections, which could
help microbes penetrate the bloodstream.

How long it would take to discover that a flu vaccine nationally
administered to millions of people was contaminated with serratia -- and
how many would become infected and sickened before the program was
stopped -- is a question that, fortunately, remains unanswered.

If the contaminated vaccine had been shipped and injected, doctors might
start to pick up signs like swelling and redness at the site of the flu
shot, said Dr. Suzanne Bradley, an infectious disease specialist at the
University of Michigan Medical School.

"For most of us, we'd probably fight it off and say, 'I'm never going to
get this vaccine again,' " she said.

But in the more vulnerable patients, like the elderly with underlying
medical problems, serratia could multiply in the heart valves and spread
to the lungs, causing pneumonia, said UC Berkeley's Riley.

"Such a person could potentially die," said Riley. "Even if you had one
single case like that, it could be devastating."

The aggressive treatment often needed to control a serratia infection
also has its risks, said Riley.

"As a treatment of last resort, you have to use multiple drugs," Riley
said. But a prolonged course of combined antibiotics would expose
patients to the further danger of infection by fungal growths, he said.
"Treatment becomes very, very difficult."

How serious and how widespread the health damage might be from such a
contaminated flu vaccine would depend on how many of the live germs, or
the toxins from its cell walls, had managed to infiltrate each vaccine
dose, said the University of Michigan's Dr. Bradley. A sole bacterium
might cause no harm.

However, one of serratia's other tricks is that it can keep multiplying,
even if the solution containing it is chilled.

"It grows in the refrigerator," said Mary York.

Flu shot shortage
The American health care system had planned to inoculate a record 100
million people against flu when British drug regulators blocked the
release of the 46 million flu vaccine doses made at the Liverpool plant
of Chiron Corp.

U.S. officials have replaced some of the lost vaccine, boosting
available doses to 61 million, and have attempted to reserve supplies
for the most vulnerable people -- the elderly, the ill and young
children. The flu kills 36,000 people a year in the United States,
primarily among high-risk groups.

Congress is investigating the quality of oversight of the Chiron plant
by the Food and Drug Administration. The Securities and Exchange
Commission and federal prosecutors also are investigating whether Chiron
downplayed its problem in public statements.

CDC medical ethicists are drafting guidelines for the fair allocation of
crucial drug supplies in case of future shortages -- decisions now
handled by local health officials. ++



It is not enough to be compassionate; you must act.
-- The Dalai Lama


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