Marburg Variant U

[Guest MSandt]

Have anyone of you read Ken Alibek's 'Biohazard'? It reveals the secrets of the Soviet bioweapon programs.

The following text is an interview but the same things are mentioned in 'Biohazard' as well.

The Soviets were working on Marburg virus and they managed to capture a far deadlier strain of it which they named 'Marburg Variant U' (named after its first victim).

After reading the following you'll know where Morgan & Wong got their information concerning the Marburg Variant PrP (many lines from episodes 'The Fourth Horseman' & 'The Time Is Now' appear in the text):

"Dr. Ustinov was forty-four years old. Alibek recalls him as a fair-skinned man with light-brown hair, ethnically a Russian. He had a wife and children. Alibek thought of him as a good guy and a talented scientist, easy to talk with, receptive to new ideas. Ustinov had been doing basic military research on the Marburg virus, studying its potential as a weapon. The long-term goal was to see if it could be loaded into special biological warheads on the MIRV missiles that were aimed at the United States. (A MIRV has multiple warheads, which are directed at different targets.) At the time, the Soviet biological missile warheads were designed to be loaded with strategic/operational smallpox virus, Black Death, and anthrax. The Marburg virus had potential for weaponization, too. Marburg is a close cousin to the Ebola virus, and is extremely lethal. Dr. Ustinov had been wearing a spacesuit in a Level 4 hot lab, injecting guinea pigs with Marburg virus. He pricked himself in the finger with a needle, and it penetrated two layers of rubber gloves.

Nikolai Ustinov exited through an air lock and a chemical decon shower to Level 3, and used an emergency telephone to call his supervisor. The supervisor decided to put Ustinov into a biocontainment hospital, a twenty-bed unit with steel air-lock doors, like the doors of a submarine, where nurses and doctors wearing spacesuits could monitor him. He was not allowed to speak with his wife and children. Ustinov did not seem to be afraid of dying, but, separated from his family, he became deeply depressed.

On about the fourth day, Ustinov developed a headache, and his eyes turned red. Tiny hemorrhages were occurring in them. He requested a laboratory notebook, and he began writing a diary in it, every day. He was a scientist, and he was determined to explain how he was dying. What does it feel like to die of Marburg virus? What are the psychological effects? For a while, he maintained a small hope that he wouldn't die, but when his skin developed spontaneous bruises he understood what the future held. Dr. Sandakhchiev's cryptograms to Alibek were dry and factual, and didn't include the human details. Alibek would later learn that perhaps twice Ustinov had broken down and wept.

Alibek was frantic to get help to Ustinov. He begged the Ministry of Defense for a special immune serum, but bureaucratic delays prevented its arrival in Siberia until it was too late. When Ustinov began to vomit blood and pass bloody black diarrhea, the doctor gave him transfusions, but as they put the blood into him it came out of his mouth and rectum. Ustinov was in prostration. They debated replacing all the blood in his body with fresh new blood -- a so-called whole-body transfusion. They were afraid that that might trigger a total flooding hemorrhage, which would kill him, so they didn't do it.

ALIBEK did not know exactly which strain of Marburg had infected his colleague. It had been obtained by Soviet intelligence somewhere, but the scientists were never told where strains came from. The Marburg virus seems to live in an unknown animal host in East Africa. It has been associated with Kitum Cave, near Mt. Elgon, so the Soviet strain could have been obtained around there, but Alibek suspected that it came from Germany. In 1967, the virus had broken out at a vaccine factory in Marburg, a small city in central Germany, and had killed a number of people who were working with monkeys that were being used to produce vaccine. One of the survivors was a man named Popp, and Alibek thought that Ustinov was probably dying of the strain that had come from him. I have seen a photograph of a Marburg monkey worker taken shortly before his death, in late summer, 1967. He is a stout man, lying on a hospital bed without a shirt. His mouth is slack, his teeth are covered with blood. He is hemorrhaging from the mouth and nose. The blood has run down his neck and pooled in the hollow of his throat. It looks spidery, because it's unable to clot. He also seems to be leaking blood from his nipples.

The final pages of Dr. Nikolai Ustinov's scientific journal are smeared with unclotted blood. His skin developed starlike hemorrhages in the underlayers. Incredibly -- the Vector scientists had never seen this -- he sweated blood directly from the pores of his skin, and left bloody fingerprints on the pages of his diary. He wept again before he died.

Ken Alibek is nearly hypnotic when he speaks of these things in his flat voice. We sat around the kitchen table as if we were old friends sharing a story. A gray light shone through the kitchen window, and I saw the red flash of a cardinal near the Patricks' bird feeder, almost a flicker of blood. The dog noticed a squirrel, and started barking. "Go get him, Billy," Patrick said, rising to let the dog out.

Dr. Ustinov died on April 30, 1988. An autopsy was performed in the spacesuit morgue of the biocontainment hospital. If this was indeed the Popp strain of Marburg virus -- and who could say? -- it was incredibly lethal. It produced effects in the human body that were stunning, terrifying. Alibek says that a pathology team removed Ustinov's liver and his spleen. They sucked a quantity of his destroyed blood out of a leg vein using large syringes.

They froze the blood and the body parts. They kept the Ustinov strain alive and continually replicating in the laboratories at Vector. They named the strain Variant U, after Ustinov, and they learned how to mass-produce it in simple bioreactors, flasks used for growing viruses. They dried Variant U, and processed it into an inhalable dust. The particles of Variant U were coated to protect them in the air so that they would drift for many miles.

In late 1990, Biopreparat researchers tested airborne Variant U on monkeys and other small animals in special explosion-test chambers at the Stepnagorsk plant. Marburg Variant U proved to be extremely potent in airborne form. They found that just one to five microscopic particles of Variant U lodged in the lungs of a monkey were almost guaranteed to make the animal crash, bleed, and die. With normal weapons-grade anthrax, in comparison, it takes about eight thousand spores lodged in the lungs to pretty much guarantee infection and death.

Alibek said that by the fall of 1991, just before Boris Yeltsin came to power, Marburg Variant U was on the verge of becoming a strategic/operational biological weapon, ready to be manufactured in large quantities and loaded into warheads on MIRVs. These warheads are sinister things. Ten separate cone-shaped warheads, each targeted on a different location, sit atop a missile. Special cooling systems inside each warhead keep the virus alive during the heat of reentry through the earth's atmosphere. "If we can land a cosmonaut to earth alive, we can do the same with a virus," Alibek explained. "We use parachutes." The biowarheads are parachuted over a city, and at a certain altitude they break apart. Out of each warhead bursts a spray of more than a hundred oval bomblets the size of small cantaloupes. The cantaloupes fly out a distance and then split in overlapping patterns, releasing a haze of bioparticles that quickly becomes invisible.

Variant U never became part of the Soviets' strategic arsenal, which was stocked with Black Death, Alibekov anthrax, and powdered smallpox. (Never less than twenty tons of weapons-grade dry smallpox was stockpiled in bunkers.) But it seems quite possible that when the Russian biowarfare facilities fell on hard times and biologists began leaving Russia to work in other countries, some of them carried freeze-dried Variant U with them, ready for further experimentation. Variant U started, perhaps, with a monkey worker named Popp, but its end in the human species is yet to be seen. "

[Guest LauraKrycek]

Okay, I must admit:  the simple idea of the Marburg Virus terrifies me.  I didn't even realize it was an actual disease until, a few days after seeing "The Fourth Horseman\The Time is Now" for the first time, I typed "Marburg Virus" into the CDC search engine on a whim while sitting in my high school's library.  Imagine my surprise!  I walked right over and got a copy of Richard Preston's "The Hot Zone", which cinched it for me.  It's some scary stuff.

Of course, luckily enough, a vaccine has just been found (about 12 days ago, actually) that can prevent the Ebola virus with only one shot.  And, hopefully, the method with which they created this vaccine, they say, will be useful with creating a number of other vaccines, such as Ebola's sister virus, Marburg.  So there is hope on the horizon!  Not like Marburg is running rampant through the hillsides, but I'm sure we'd all sleep sounder knowing that there was hope.

[Guest MSandt]

Well I bought 'The Hot Zone' just two weeks ago  Haven't had time to read it yet but I heard it's one nasty book

Yeah they created a vaccine which works at least on monkeys but each new strain requires a new vaccine. And no one really knows what happened to Marburg Variant U after the Soviet Union collapsed - Some believe it could have been taken to countries like Iraq (some Soviet scientists defected to Iraq after the collapse).

And there won't be any vaccines for this strain as long as Russians keep their mouths shut

And then they also suspect that a so called 'Ebolapox' disease exists which is a combination of Small Pox & Ebola. I have no idea why they create such diseases for 'defense purposes'.

[Guest Wellington]

Hi

I just imagine the effects through warfare use. The time needed to only identify the virus would be enough to bring down all medical or assistance system. Only 5 spores to be infected? One never can be quicker than that. The streets would be full of dying people or corpses. But thinking of it as a weapon, it seems more useful for wiping life from earth than for retaliating. Winds are often capricious... What a mess it would be! Ustinov must have been very cool-blooded to analyse his own dying moments. I would not!

Regards

[Guest MSandt]

Yeah it would be difficult to control the spread of a virus in a case of war or something. One plane could take it from New York to Moscow. But what is more likely is that a virus could be used by a terrorist group. Terrorist cells have been trying to obtain not only nuclear but also biological material.

"A small amount of Marburg or Ebola released in the subway system of Washington, Boston, or New York, or in an airport, shopping mall, or financial center, could produce hundreds of thousands of victims." -from Biohazard.

Ustinov must have been very cool-blooded to analyse his own dying moments. I would not!

A scientists is a scientists as long as he lives:;):

[Guest The_0ld_Man]

I find it eerily interesting that shortly after the finale of MilleniuM things started to occur similar to the Marburg PrP..out here in the east crow's started turning up dead on the roads..and shortly after people started to become ill with West Nile...coincidence?

Regards,

The_0ld_Man

[Guest LauraKrycek]

I find it eerily interesting that shortly after the finale of MilleniuM things started to occur similar to the Marburg PrP..out here in the east crow's started turning up dead on the roads..and shortly after people started to become ill with West Nile...coincidence?

Okay... freaky.  Yeah, when I heard that birds started dying, I couldn't help but think about MM.  I had a parakeet that mysteriously died, and my mother started having eye problems (left her with permanent blind spots) that they said could have been caused by symptoms of a variation of West Nile (though that was a longshot).

Of course, it would only be MM fans that would make that connection.  Just like even though the government apparently never thought of planes being used as weapons prior to 9/11, everyone who watched TLG pilot knew what was going down without realizing they did.  Sad.  If only some paranoid government official had watched that and gotten a tip-off.

[The Old Man]

That first post was fascinating and I think I missed it first time around. On the subject of The Black Death, does anyone know if it was resticted to the UK or was it worldwide, my history's not that good? Also, in these modern times, has it been identified as one of the virus's we now know as Ebola or something equally devastating?

Graham

[Libby]

The following is an amalgamation of bits and pieces I found on the BBC web site:

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The plague, otherwise known as the Black Death, ravaged Europe and Asia between the 14th and 17th Centuries. In the 14th Century alone it is estimated to have killed 200 million people.  In 1347 refugees from Genoese settlements in the Crimea brought it to Italy. Within five years, anything up to half of the population of Europe had died from the plague.

The bacterium is called Yersinia pestis - a dynamic and rapidly changing organism which evolved thousands of years ago from a far more benign, gut-dwelling bacterium - Y. pseudotuberculosis. It changed from living in the gut to living in the blood and became capable of leaping between fleas and mammals.

The genetic structure has been resarched by scientists at the Sanger Centre, Cambridge, UK, who worked on a sample taken from a veterinary surgeon in Colorado who died in 1992 after a plague-infected cat sneezed on him.

Although the disease is no longer a major health problem in Europe, it is still prevalent in some parts of the world. About 3,000 cases are reported annually to the World Health Organisation.

There are fears that climate change and increasing globalisation could see a re-emergence of the disease in the developed world. Black rats, the bacterium's hosts, have recently reappeared in some parts of the UK.

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Sounds pretty scary stuff. But (to go back to Marbug and MM) when you think about the SARS epidemic and how it was handled, it sounds pretty much like the Marburg outbreak at the end of Season 2. I know some fans found the downgrading of the outbreak at the beginning of Season 3 fairly implausible, but it does match the story of SARS. That's a real-life example of how effective containment practices can minimise what could otherwise have been a devastating epidemic.

The BBC web site can be found at:

https://news.bbc.co.uk/

You can click on the "News" section (part way down on the left) which provides fairly up-to-date news, or click on the "Categories" tab at the top which will take you to a whole raft of interesting pages on a wide range of subjects. It's my second favourite website (after TIWWA which is the first bookmark on my toolbar). It's a great site for browsing on a cloudy Sunday afternoon when you're supposed to be doing housework!

Libby

[The Old Man]

Hey thanks Libby info which I found fascinating and for taking the trouble to find it. Much appreciated and indeed it is scary stuff. 3000 cases a year seems a lot to me!

Gra