The USDA was wrong about its ballyhooed disease campaign results. A prescient article, buried deep within the New York Times on Christmas Eve 1967, hinted at what the future held: fatal virus found in wild ducks on li. The tiny newsbrief reported that sixty wild black ducks were found dead in Flanders Bay, at the head of Long Island's North and South forks. A Department of the Interior official admitted the discovery posed a "more dangerous" problem than the duck-farm outbreak. He was right. Wild waterfowl, whose travel is impossible to control, picked up the virus from the Long Island duck farms and spread it north and south along the North American flyway to geese, swans, blue-winged teals, and mallards. In 1970 and 1971, the virus infected birds throughout Pennsylvania and Maryland. By 1973, it reached the Lake Andes National Wildlife Refuge in faraway South Dakota, where forty thousand mallards and Canadian geese died and had to be collected, piled into a mammoth heap, and set ablaze. The infection reached the Gulf of Mexico and Canada by 1975.
The virus continues to spread to this day.
After the infection at the three farms, two local veterinarians brought bird carcasses and tissue specimens to Plum Island to confirm the infection by Dutch duck plague. Just as they had during the West Nile virus outbreak years later, Plum Island officials told reporters there was no possible way their laboratory caused this outbreak, because they did not study the virus until after the outbreak occurred. However, it was they who first conducted "exhaustive" laboratory tests and confirmed the outbreak was a foreign duck virus, so it's safe to say they had diagnostic agents to detect the virus and conceivably the virus itself in their stores. After all, they had to match the virus against something to make a positive identification. The results, said the Plum Island scientists of the new virus unleashed in their backyard, were "particularly interesting…in that they point out that duck plague virus infection is, in most probability, a new infection on Long Island. It appears that the virus was introduced from outside areas to the Suffolk County duck farms." Could there have been a laboratory leak on the order of the government-acknowledged virus outbreak that occurred there a decade later? As early as 1970, Plum Island was again working on a strain of duck virus, and this one had infected a man suffering from infectious hepatitis virus. "The implications," wrote the scientists of their research, "offer some unpleasant possibilities: first as a mode of introducing a serious avian disease into this country, and second as a possible source of new human viruses by recombination between [the duck virus] and human influenza."
Today, vast tract-home developments and million-dollar Hamptons estates rise above the fields where sixty-four family-owned duck farms once proudly stood. Meanwhile, a few small duck farms on Long Island are left, eking out a meager existence. There are two reminders of the once grand Long Island duck industry: a twenty-foot-tall concrete duck, built by a farmer in 1931 to sell his ducks and eggs on the roadside, that now sits guarding the entrance to a county park, and the Long Island Ducks, a minor league baseball team established in 2000, its untactful name highlighting an extinct part of New York State's heritage. It's hardly an exaggeration to say that nine out of ten Long Island Duck fans couldn't explain the origin of their team's name.
Like West Nile fever and Lyme disease, Dutch duck plague is an emerging disease in the United States that continues to spread with no end in sight. And like the other two, no one knows to this day how the duck virus entered into the United States and ravaged the duck farms of eastern Long Island.
Speaking of the vaccine they prepared for the collapsed Long Island duck industry in 1975—too late to be of any help to the farmers — Plum Island assistant director Dr. John Graves said to a reporter, "You see, we do have an impact."
Three infectious germs, Bb, West Nile virus, and duck enteritis virus — all foreign germs — have infiltrated the American landscape. All three emerged from the same geographic locus. All three occurred in the vicinity of a high-hazard, high-containment foreign germ laboratory with demon-strably faulty facilities and pitiable biological safety practices — flaws that caused proven germ outbreaks in the past, and infections among its employees. The public is asked to accept that none of these three outbreaks is connected to Plum Island.
That's what one calls blind faith.
As you read on, consider for yourself whether that assertion has merit.
PART 2
THE SAFEST LAB IN THE WORLD
4
Genesis
Plum Island will permit the Army Chemical Corps to execute required projects in connection with imported agents…that might become of Biological Warfare significance.
A few years before the Plum Island Animal Disease Center's dedication day in 1956, the United States launched its first biological warfare program. A glimpse into the past reveals a surprising truth: Plum Island wasn't exactly what it appeared to be to the public.
The gory details were kept secret at the time, but America's germ warfare goals — national defense — were heralded by the nation's leaders and press. A New York Times editorial in 1945 mused, "When the scientific story of the war is written, we have here an epic that rivals that of the atomic bomb." The paper was right. A few months after the United States demonstrated its atomic warfare prowess on Japan, it announced the development of a second weapon: killer microscopic germs. While forty-five people participated in the British biological warfare effort, the American version involved four thousand men and women. The Army ran the innocuously titled "War Research Service" (WRS) program at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. Civilian chemist George W. Merck directed the work, advised by scientists from the nation's top universities.
These men were motivated by the threats of the times. In ways, they were no different from the atomic fathers Einstein and Oppenheimer. Theodor Rosebury, a Columbia University microbiologist who worked on the WRS projects, said, "We resolved the ethical question just as other equally good men resolved the same question at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos."
The aims of the biological warfare program didn't trouble Dr. Albert Webb, a Fort Detrick scientist in the early years. "That aspect never worried me personally. People had been killing people for millennia. Whether you hit him over the head with a club, stab him with a spear, or give him a disease he might get anyway — let's not balk at that." One has to look at the whole picture and understand the enemy of the time, says Webb. "We knew other nations, Germany and Japan—and Russia — were working on this, and in self-defense, we had to know what the potential was. Maybe it's not a popular thought today, but I still feel that it was necessary."
Dr. Edwin Fred, Dr. Webb's ultimate boss and the patriarch of WRS, was a veterinarian, as were Merck's top aide, Colonel Arvo Thompson, Fort Detrick founder Dr. Ira Baldwin, and Dr. William Hagan (who, in addition to spawning Plum Island along with Erich Traub, helped Baldwin establish Fort Detrick). Like MDs, they were trained in infectious disease. But unlike their medical counterparts, the vets weren't ethically bound by an oath that began: "First, do no harm… " Dr. Webb recalled the mind-sets of the two branches of medicine. "The MDs had this unresolved medical conflict — they weren't supposed to help kill people. Vets, I think, were much more ready than MDs," he says. "There's obviously not the same feelings about the death of their subjects. The mass killing of animals for food is an accepted part of our culture." Unlikely as it seems, the veterinarian was ideally suited for germ warfare research and development.