Sverdlovsk anthrax leak

In early April 1979 people living and working downwind of Compound 19, a military microbiology facility in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), began falling ill with high fevers and breathing trouble. Within weeks dozens had died. Sheep and cattle in villages further along the same line also died. Soviet authorities said the outbreak was intestinal anthrax caused by eating contaminated meat from private markets, destroyed stray dogs and meat stocks, and scrubbed buildings. The death toll was at least 64, and some estimates are higher; medical records were confiscated by the KGB.¹²

Western intelligence suspected an accidental release from a bioweapons plant, which would mean the Soviet Union was breaking the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, but Moscow denied it for over a decade. In 1992 Boris Yeltsin, who had been the region's Communist Party chief in 1979, admitted that military work had caused the outbreak. A 1994 study in Science by a team led by Harvard biologist Matthew Meselson, who had earlier accepted the meat explanation, mapped the victims' locations and showed they lay in a narrow zone downwind of the compound on April 2, proving an airborne release.¹²³