Fallout of an Invisible War Science: New controversy over army germ
testing

From July 25, 1994 Newsweek page 61

In 1953, Early in the cold war, U.S. army workers arrived in a lower-middle-class neighborhood of Minneapolis with a set of small metal boxes. No one questioned their explanations about testing air-raid defenses - certainly not Carol Thomas, a first grader at Clinton School. Even after the births of her three boys years later - one learning-disabled, one a Down baby, another nicknamed "Mr. Bear" because he can't speak, but only roars - Thomas, now 46, never gave the boxes a thought. Nor did fellow alumna Diane Gorney, 50, though she was aware that, like her, many of her old schoolmates were unable to have children. "We used to joke that it was the water at Clinton," recalls Gorney. The joking ended in May, when a TV station contacted both women. The army's metal boxes, reporters told them, had been sampling the air for zinc cadmium sulfide, a mock biololgical-warfare agent the army had been spraying from a roof near the school. "As we found out more and more," says Gorney,"we started bawling our eyes out."

Zinc cadmium sulfide is one of four substances the army long ago admitted having sprayed over 239 sites to simulate covert biological attacks. Between 1949 and 1969, when President Nixon halted offensive germ-warfare efforts, army technicians misted the cadmium compound over a St. Louis slum, broke light bulbs filled with bacteria in the New York subways, fitted suitcases to spray passengers at Washington, D.C.'s National Airport and shot bacterial "aerosols" over the city of San Francisco. Since 1977, when newspaper reports led congressional hearings on the spraying, the army has claimed that the agents were harmless. Biologists have answered that no large-scale release of bacteria should be considered safe. Though the army was probably not knowingly spraying toxic particles, all the simulants, experts, should have been tested more stringently. "They didn't check the literature very carefully," says Matthew Meselson, professor of bio-chemistry at Harvard. "They were sloppy." The clutch of damaged children in Minneapolis is being treated as fresh evidence that the army didn't look hard enough for dangers. Of 15 women who were in her fourth-grade class, Gorney has found, seven are sterile. The other eight have had 25 miscarriages among them. More than a third of the class's offspring are retarded. But even a localized crop of troubled pregnancies may be hard to pin on the spraying. "These clusters come up very often," says Dr. Allen Wilcox, cheif of reproductive epidemiology at th National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Wicaz says the Minneapolis case warrants further study, though he cautions, "Niney-nine out of 100 are coincidental." In a 1981 trial, the army successfully argued that an outbreak at rare bacterial infections that killed a man a month after the San Francisco test in 1950 was pure coincidence. The judge also ruled that the army had reasonable cause at the time to think the bacteria were safe. In a report delivered to Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone last week, the army is apparently readying to take the same position, disclaiming any adverse health effects while admitting there is limited data on how cadmium affects childbearing.

Meanwhile, Thomas still struggles with her three boys. "I wouldn't trade them in for anything," she says. "But what did I do wrong? I didn't take drugs. I just went to school." To her, her kids aren't all the army has to answer for. "At the very least, they violated our civil rights and called it patriotism." It's enough to give the cold war a bad name.

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