Latest / Best of: Features / The secret Cold War bioweapons test that exposed millions in the Bay Area

Transcript

The secret Cold War bioweapons test that exposed millions in the Bay Area · Best of: Features

• 0:05
  The secret Cold War Bioweapons tests that expose millions in the Bay
• 0:08
  Area. Written by Katie Dowd. His article is being read by an
• 0:14
  automated voice, generated by Everlet. Three days before Christmas nineteen seventy six,
• 0:20
  Edward Nevin III was standing on a BART platform, newspaper in hand,
• 0:24
  waiting for his train into The city. Amid front page stories detailing
• 0:28
  a hijacking attempt at SFO and the computer threat to the Postal
• 0:31
  Service, Nevin's eye was caught by another headline, Army tested biological war
• 0:36
  in SF The story spoke of simulated biological attacks on San Francisco
• 0:40
  that took place over a few days in nineteen fifty. No one
• 0:44
  in the city knew the test was happening, and at least one
• 0:46
  civilian, a seventy five year old man, died after being exposed to
• 0:50
  the bacteria. The man's name was Edward Nevin. That article was how
• 0:55
  the Nevin family, scattered across the Bay Area, learned about what actually
• 0:59
  killed their beloved patriarch decades earlier, and although largely forgotten today, the
• 1:04
  story set off a firestorm of anger and fear about the US
• 1:07
  government, treating its citizens like a laboratory full of guinea pigs. The
• 1:12
  American government has done many evil things in the name of national
• 1:15
  security, but few were as nefarious as its human experiments during the
• 1:19
  Cold War. Ordinary people were drugged with LSD, subjected to psychological abuse
• 1:25
  and pushed to the breaking point and beyond. With paranoia about the
• 1:29
  Soviet Union at a fever pitch in the nineteen fifties, the government
• 1:32
  was obsessed with the threat of attack. In nineteen fifty, U.S. Army
• 1:37
  leadership decided the best way to protect the nation from a Soviet
• 1:40
  bioweapons attack was by attempting to poison the American people first. They
• 1:45
  identified eight cities across the country that were possible targets, among them
• 1:49
  San Francisco. To see how far deadly particles could spread through They
• 1:53
  air, scientists suggested the Army use a bacteria called Cerratia marcessins. Seracia
• 1:59
  first caught the attention of scientists in the early eighteen hundreds, when
• 2:02
  the people of Padua, Italy, saw something unusual. Their polenta kept turning
• 2:08
  red. Paranoid villagers brought in priests, fearful of a devilish influence on
• 2:12
  their dinner, but scientists discovered the organisms weren't satanic. They were bacterial.
• 2:18
  In a healthy individual, Ceratia marcesins exposure normally isn't a problem, but
• 2:23
  for people who are immunocompromised, and especially those hospitalized, a seemingly harmless
• 2:28
  infection can become fatal. Those infected can develop pneumonia, heart inflammation called
• 2:33
  endocarditis, meningitis, or blood poisoning. Serratia marsessens is also largely resistant
• 2:39
  to antibiotics even today, making successful treatment difficult, but none of this
• 2:44
  was known to the military officials about to dose San Francisco, with
• 2:47
  the bacteria. In late september nineteen fifty, a warship normally used as
• 2:52
  a minesweeper was outfitted with commercial spraying equipment. Inside the sprayers was
• 2:57
  a slurry of Surreobacteria. As the minesweeper sat a few miles offshore,
• 3:02
  the sprayers sent the bacteria wafting onto the wind into the city.
• 3:06
  On september twenty seventh, the final day of the test, like so
• 3:10
  many mornings in San Francisco clouds drifted low over the water. A
• 3:14
  cool wind blew off the ocean, ruffling the hair of bankers hurrying
• 3:17
  to work in the financial district, families grocery shopping in the mission,
• 3:21
  and tourists taking in the view at Fisherman's Wharf. According to a
• 3:25
  declassified Army report, almost every person in San Francisco that day inhaled
• 3:30
  five thousand or more particles per minute over the course of several
• 3:33
  hours. San Francisco residents were inhaling millions of bacteria and particles every
• 3:38
  day during the week of testing. Leonard Cole wrote in his book
• 3:42
  Clouds of Secrecy. Government records would later show them
• 3:45
  bacteria dispersed much farther than the city of San Francisco. Clouds reached
• 3:50
  Army monitoring stations, in Colma, Daly City, Sazolito, and across the bay
• 3:54
  in Albany, Berkeley, Oakland, and San Leandro. The scientific method gone mad.
• 4:01
  Within days, Stanford University Hospital in San Francisco began seeing a spike
• 4:05
  in unusual cases, illnesses caused by exposure to Cratium marcessins. In the
• 4:10
  history of the hospital they'd never had a single case. Now they
• 4:13
  had eleven. Among them was a seventy five year old retired PG
• 4:17
  and E employee named Edward Nevin He'd recently had a procedure for
• 4:21
  a prostate condition, but there had been no complications, and he'd returned
• 4:25
  home. Suddenly, though, he took a turn for the worse, experiencing what
• 4:29
  his son called intense pain and suffering. Nevin was rushed back to
• 4:33
  the hospital. Whatever ailed him didn't respond to antibiotics, and Nevin languished
• 4:39
  for three weeks before dying. The doctors insisted on an autopsy, his
• 4:43
  son Edward Nevin Junior said. They apparently were as perplexed as we
• 4:47
  were. The autopsy found Nevin had died of a heart infection caused
• 4:51
  by Sarea Marsessens. The San Francisco outbreak was so sudden and mysterious
• 4:56
  that a group of Stanford physicians wrote up the event for a
• 4:59
  medical journal, but although the army now knew their experiment had likely
• 5:03
  killed a man, them tests continued for another sixteen years in cities
• 5:07
  across the nation. One so called vulnerability test involved secretly dropping a
• 5:12
  light bulb filled with bacteria from a New York City subway train.
• 5:16
  Samples found traces of the bacteria in tunnels spread from fourteenth to
• 5:20
  fifty eighth Street. In nineteen seventy six, the experiments burst onto the
• 5:25
  national consciousness as some reports were declassified. The impacts, doctors and scientists
• 5:30
  feared, were long ranging. At San Francisco General Hospital, two dozen patients
• 5:35
  since nineteen sixty nine had been diagnosed with endocarditis caused by serratia
• 5:39
  marsessins, thirteen of them died. A staff physician at the hospital told
• 5:44
  the Chronicle the cluster was five to ten times The national average,
• 5:48
  and it was possible the uptick was linked, even years later, to
• 5:51
  that army test. After learning about the likely cause of his grandfather's
• 5:56
  death, Edward Nevin III spoke with the Chronicle. It is just incredible.
• 6:01
  The scientific method gone mad. Doctor Strangelove, but it is not fiction,
• 6:06
  he said. The Department of the Army completely disregarded the dignity of
• 6:09
  the individual. Nevin III, who worked as a lawyer, sued the US
• 6:13
  government on behalf of his family. By the many of the leaders
• 6:17
  of the experiment were retired, aging but unrepentant about what they'd done.
• 6:22
  The technical director of the government's biological warfare program during the nineteen
• 6:26
  fifties testified that the Bay Area populace should be pleased that they'd
• 6:31
  been unknowingly sprayed with bacteria in the name of Cold War safety.
• 6:35
  Another scientist said if he was put in the same position, with
• 6:38
  Then,
• 6:38
  knowledge he now had, he'd still run the test. With some government
• 6:43
  documents still classified, and the only contemporaneous account of Nevin's death coming
• 6:48
  from Stanford's Medical Journal article, there wasn't enough evidence to prove the
• 6:52
  test had definitively caused his death. A judge ruled against the Nevins,
• 6:57
  ending their legal quest for justice, but in the court of public
• 7:00
  opinion history has joined their side. Nevin is regularly cited as a
• 7:05
  victim of the Test, a death that the government apparently chalked up
• 7:08
  as a necessary evil to win the Cold War. When his son,
• 7:11
  Edward junior, died in twenty seventeen, his obituary called it one of
• 7:16
  the government's darkest secrets. The long term impacts. The there are the
• 7:22
  Tests ripples through the twenty first century. In two thousand one, a
• 7:26
  Bay Area UPS driver with chronic back pain went to his health
• 7:30
  care provider for a cortisone shot. Two O days later he died
• 7:33
  of bacterial meningitis. Within weeks, three deaths had been linked to contaminated
• 7:38
  cortisone shots prepared in a Walnut Creek pharmacy. The shots had all
• 7:42
  been tainted by seradia bacteria, which can cause meningitis if injected near
• 7:46
  the spinal cord. Much like the nineteen sixty nine outbreak of serracea
• 7:51
  caused endocarditis cases, scientists wondered whether the nineteen fifty experiment had done
• 7:56
  something fundamental to the Bay Area ecosystem. An infectious diseases professor at
• 8:01
  UC Berkeley said scientists could not dispel the theory that pumping millions
• 8:05
  of bacteria into the air had permanently changed the Bay Area's microbial
• 8:09
  ecology. To prove it one way or another, scientists needed samples of
• 8:14
  the army's nineteen fifty strain of serratia to compare with modern day
• 8:18
  outbreaks. The government has never handed those over, if they were preserved
• 8:22
  at all. Although Edward Nevin's death devastated his close knit family, his
• 8:27
  life has reverberated across the generations. He immigrated from Ireland, raised seven
• 8:32
  children in the mission with his wife Mary, and watched their children
• 8:35
  and grandchildren become nurses, teachers, police officers, lawyers, and even the mayor
• 8:40
  of Daly City. His life was cut short, but his legacy remains.
• 8:45
  Nevin is buried among family in the Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in
• 8:48
  Colma. On summer days soft fog rolls through the graveyard in waves,
• 8:52
  but now it carries only the cool mist from the sea, fresh
• 8:55
  and clean.