WFSCBC:[ WARRIOR NEWS ].///\\*|||.
US MILITARY EXPOSED 800,000 AMERICANS TO HARMFUL BACTERIA IN WARFARE EXPERIMENT:
JULY 13, 2015.
MOST PEOPLE HAVE NEVER HEARD OF OPERATION SEA SPRAY.
It might sound like the name of an angsty punk rock band, but this couldn't be further from the truth.
It was a 1950 Navy operation that was referred to as a 'vulnerability-test'.
They wanted to identify regions of the country that would be particularly susceptible to a 'biological-terrorist-attack'.
Officials picked San Francisco as a target, given its proximity to the ocean, its high population, and its 'dense-downtown'... With all of these factors, it's easy to understand why they felt 'The-City-by-the-Bay' would be a likely target.
Over the course of six days in September, bluejackets spewed clouds of 'Serratia-marcescens' over SF, a microbe they believed to be harmless, as indicated by a 'US-Navy-report... "Serratia marcescens is so rarely a cause of illness, and the illness resulting is predominantly so trivial, that its use as a simulant should be continued, even over populated areas".
It turns out they were wrong... Scientific American refers to the microbe as 'sinister'.
In a statement with the magazine, associate professor of ophthalmology at 'University-of-Pittsburgh', Robert Shanks, gives 'Serratia-marcescens' a spot in the 'top-10' when talking about causes of 'hospital-acquired-respiratory-neonatal-and-surgical-infections'.
Of course, all of this was unknown back in 1950, when 'Serratia-marcescens' was chosen for its tendency to turn things red.
The microbe's dangers were masked by its usefulness as a biological marker, its red pigmentation made it a prime candidate for 'Operation-Sea-Spray'.
Leonard Cole is the director of the 'Terror-Medicine-and-Security-program' at 'Rutgers-Medical-School', and his 1988 book, 'Clouds-of-Secrecy', went through many of the events that transpired surrounding the operation in 1950.
"Nearly all of San Francisco received 500 particle minutes per litre... In other words, nearly every one of the 800,000 people in San Francisco exposed to the cloud at a normal breathing rate of 10 litres per minute, inhaled 5,000, or more, particles per minute during the several hours that they remained airborne".
These volumes are large, but that was insignificant when the distributing party viewed the contents as harmless.
As time passed, the Navy's mistake began to unveil itself.
The, now defunct, 'Stanford-University-Hospital' in San Francisco admitted eleven patients in the week following the operation, and they all had strange and severe urinary tract infections which could not be treated with antibiotics of the era.
According to a 2004 San Francisco Chronicle story, 'Serratia-marcescens' destroyed the heart valves of Edward Nevin, ending with his death.
The experiment wasn't made public until 1976, at which point Nevin's son learned about the true cause of his father's death... His lawsuit would eventually find its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case, Nevin v. United States.
The court decided to uphold the decision of the lower courts, and the United States was not found to be at fault.
Discover Magazine wrote... "The operation was one of the largest offences of the Nuremberg Code since its inception, a deplorable betrayal of the public health and safety, of informed consent and civil liberties", which is particularly unsettling considering how 'Operation-Sea-Spray' was under way just three years after the ten points of the code were laid out.
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