MOSCOW - The deadliest anthrax outbreak on record began in silence and killed quietly - both literally and figuratively. Sometime on April 2, 1979, millions of spores of anthrax began to spread across southern sections of the Ural Mountains city known at the time as Sverdlovsk. A meat-plant worker named Vasily Ivanov was out walking his dog. The day shift at a ceramics factory was grinding sand and clay. In a little more than a week, Ivanov was dead. So were 18 ceramics workers.

Rumours spread quickly of a deadly disease that wasted healthy men in a matter of days. But there were no articles in the newspapers, no breathless television reports, no government leaders urging calm. Except for workers who suddenly started hosing down roofs and disinfecting streets, there was little outward sign of trouble.

But in the privacy of their own homes, residents were terror-stricken. “The authorities may have believed they could prevent people from panicking by not telling the truth,” Ivanov’s daughter, Alevtina Nekrasova, recalled last week by telephone from her home in the city, renamed Yekaterinburg. ”But people were in a panic anyway; everyone sat at home, with windows and doors shut tight, shivering with fear and waiting for the first symptoms to develop. We all thought we were all going to die.”

In many ways, the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak - which killed at least 64 people and perhaps dozens more - was a looking-glass version of the current anthrax scare around the world. The death toll was far higher, but the public hysteria was lower. And it was futile to look to the federal government for help because the malevolent force behind the outbreak was the government itself.

“We lived next to a top-secret military compound,” Nekrasova, 42, said. “Common logic suggests that it could not have been anything but a biological weapon. What other explanation can there be?”

The Sverdlovsk outbreak has been called a “biological Chernobyl,” and just like the more well-known nuclear accident, Soviet officials’ first instinct was to cover it up. They managed to do just that, with varying degrees of success, until after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

In its most common form, anthrax is primarily a disease of farm animals. And for more than a decade, the official government explanation was that people in Sverdlovsk had been sickened by eating meat from infected animals. Officials apparently were unconcerned by the fact that it is fairly rare to contract anthrax by eating tainted animal products. Most people who catch the disease are farm or textile workers who absorb the bacteria through cuts in their skin. Less commonly, a person can contract pulmonary anthrax by inhaling the bacteria’s spores. All forms are readily treated with common antibiotics such as penicillin and tetracycline if caught in the earliest stages.

Boris N. Yeltsin, who was Sverdlovsk’s Communist Party chief at the time of the accident, acknowledged the truth in 1992, when he was Russia’s president: The anthrax had escaped from Compound No 19. But he never explained how.

In a 1999 book on the Soviet biological weapons programme, ‘Biohazard,’ former deputy chief of the project Ken Alibek recounts the explanation he heard: that a missing air filter was to blame. A clogged filter had been removed during one shift, which left a note for incoming workers to replace it, Alibek was told. The note went either missing or unheeded for several hours before the mistake was caught. The military did not notify civilian authorities, much less the public. Hospital officials were told only to be prepared for an outbreak of some kind of infectious disease. For the most part, it was left for local public health officials to figure out what to do.

To this day, the Sverdlovsk accident remains the only case of inhaled anthrax on record in which multiple victims died from a weapons-quality strain. Biological weapons experts who have studied the accident say it demonstrates some of anthrax’s strengths as a weapon. A small amount of anthrax - perhaps as little as one gram - killed dozens. It also travelled far in Sverdlovsk, killing farm animals more than 30 miles away.

But experts say it also demonstrates some of the weapon’s limitations. The killing power depends on wind speed and direction, as well as other factors. For instance, the wind that morning in 1979 was brisk and blowing steadily to the southeast, away from the city centre. Those exposed were on a fairly straight and narrow corridor. If the wind had been blowing the opposite direction, or more slowly to disperse the spores over a wider area, many more might have died.

Another lesson is that children appear to have some kind of higher immunity to airborne anthrax. For still unexplained reasons, no children died in the outbreak even though many were outside playing when the plume passed over. Also, curiously, only two of the known victims were women.—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times.