April 1979 was marked for the residents of Sverdlovsk by the mass deaths of people who became victims of anthrax. The epidemic lasted for about two and a half months. It is still not clear what was the cause.
There are several versions of how anthrax got into the city. According to one of them, the cause was infected cattle. According to the other, the workers of the secret biological laboratory of the military town of Sverdlovsk-19 are guilty. There is also a version that it was a sabotage.
Mikhail Supotnitsky, Candidate of Biological Sciences, who worked in the 19th military town, associates the epidemic in the city with the release of disputes by foreign agents.
At the end of March 1979, research with anthrax spores was temporarily stopped, but one of the employees removed a contaminated filter that protected the environment from the threat of a leak of hazardous substances, about which he wrote a note, but did not make a note in a special journal. The next shift turned on the equipment, as a result of which the spores began to spread unhindered with the air stream. Together with the wind, the deadly cloud flew to the southeast, south, as a result of which people who lived in the neighboring 32nd military town, as well as workers of the ceramic factory, began to die.
The negligence version does not quite fit into the usual framework, because the filter is two or three cascade, built into engineering systems. Even if one filter breaks, two more filters are installed to ensure greater safety, so the version of sabotage seems more plausible. It also seems strange that the anthrax spores were able to fly a distance of 50 km. in the required concentration, because the closer the source of emission, the greater the defeat should be. In this situation, everything points to the opposite - in the 19th military town nobody got sick with anthrax!
The first patient to die was reported on 4 April 1979. After that, almost every day, five people died for 2-3 weeks. The diagnosis, the cutaneous form of anthrax, was established only on April 10, after the autopsy. According to various sources, at that time from 65 to 100 people died.
An amazing fact, which also confirms the sabotage, is that the incubation period of anthrax, which has entered through the respiratory tract, is 4 - 5 days. In this case, the epidemic lasted about 70 days. According to scientists, it is not so easy to become infected with anthrax - at least 40 thousand spores are needed for one person.
Teams of chemists walked around the city every night and thoroughly disinfected the streets. Although the local population did not believe the authorities, their statements about the contaminated meat made sense, because if it was inhalation anthrax, it means that powder with spores was constantly scattered around the city, and if the intestinal form, animal feed was contaminated, the meat of which was no longer proper veterinary control was being sold in the city. When registering the first cases of the disease, a myth was invented about the negligence of one of the laboratory employees.
Promotional video:
Some commentators of the tragedy see confirmation of the version of sabotage in the fact that the radio "Voice of America" announced the release of anthrax spores on April 5th. And now it is not known how the journalists while in Washington were able to find out about the tragedy? Mikhail Supotnitsky believes that it was the United States that was beneficial to infect Sverdlovsk, since after the epidemic, the closed city of Sverdlovsk-19 was liquidated, where the center of military-technical problems of bacteriological protection was located.