Go walking through the heather on Scotland's own Anthrax Island
From Edinburgh take a train to Ullapool and rent a small fishing boat. The island of Gruinard is just off the Scottish mainland, in Gruinard Bay, half way between Ullapool and Gairloch in the Scottish Highlands.
Gruinard is an otherwise rather ordinary bit of Scotland, covered in heather and normally rather boggy underfoot. But it is also the site of the world's most ambitious biological weapons test.
British scientists demonstrated the killing power of anthrax on this remote (well, to London) Scottish island during World War II to wipe out a flock of sheep. A film was made of the test and it shows the sheep, obedient in the manner of sheep everywhere, being taken to the island, secured in wooden frames, and left there while bombs scattered spores of anthrax. The sheep started dying three days later.
This left the island so contaminated that it was officially out-of-bounds for the next 50 years. The final government report on the Gruinard Island tests, classified until 1997, suggested optimistically that anthrax could be used to render cities uninhabitable “for generations.”
Anthrax has always been one of most admired agents of biological warfare with governments—and possibly one of the most feared. The bacterium occurs naturally, in low levels, in some animals. It was not uncommon for farm workers to become infected with anthrax through skin contact—it was called “woolsorter's disease” at one point—when a boil would appear which would eventually form a black center, and it can be spread through skin contact and ingestion, but it is only when it is airborne and can be inhaled by humans in the form of spores that it is deadly. Then it is fatal in a good 95 percent of cases, even with medical treatment. Experts on biological weapons have calculated that a mere 220 pounds (100 kilos) of anthrax sprayed on a major city could kill more than three million people.
In 1986 an English company was paid half a million British pounds ($890,000) to decontaminate the 520-acre island by soaking the ground in 309 tons (280 metric tonnes) of formaldehyde diluted in 2,205 tons (2,000 metric tonnes) of seawater. Topsoil was also removed in sealed containers. To prove that the clean-up was successful, a flock of sheep is allowed to graze the island at the behest of an independent watchdog set up by the Ministry of Defense.
On April 24, 1990, the then junior Defense Minister, Michael Neubert, made the half-mile journey from the mainland to declare Gruinard safe by removing its red warning sign. But the Glasgow Herald newspaper found an archaeologist, fresh from excavation of a medieval hospital near Edinburgh, to say that his team had encountered buried anthrax spores, which had survived for hundreds of years. Dr. Brian Moffat told the paper: “I would not go walking on Gruinard... It is a very resilient and deadly bacterium.”
The British are world experts in biological warfare. As long ago as the 18th century, British officers, such as Captain Ecuyer, under the guidance of General Sir Jeffrey Amherst were distributing smallpox infected blankets (Variola major) to the North American Indians. The colonization of Australia also included the systematic infection of its native peoples by the British authorities with smallpox by forced incarceration of (healthy) Aboriginals on “quarantine islands.”
But the largest use of biological weapons that has ever occurred took place during World War II, when the infamous Japanese Army Unit 731 based in occupied Manchuria killed thousands of prisoners and villagers. The unit conducted cruel biological warfare experiments on prisoners of war and large-scale biological weapons attacks on Chinese villages with bombs and devices laced with plague and other diseases. In 1941 the Japanese attacked the city of Changteh with cholera killing 10,000 civilians. Disappointingly, even for the Japanese war-planners, some 1,700 of their soldiers also died.
It was at this time that the tests with anthrax bombs were carried out on the island of Gruinard. Impressed by this, the United States built a biological bomb production plant in 1944 capable of producing half a million four pound anthrax bomblets every month. The UK also produced millions of cattle cakes (feed) contaminated with anthrax, designed to be dropped from airplanes over Germany in order to kill livestock and cripple the country's food supply.
After visiting the island, if you experience any of the following symptoms: mild fever, malaise, fatigue, coughing and, occasionally, a feeling of pressure on the chest, you may have inhaled an anthrax spore. Death usually then takes around seven days and will be as a result of symptoms like internal bleeding, blood poisoning or even meningitis. Seek medical advice.
Antibiotics can treat anthrax if caught early.