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The Sverdlovsk Anthrax Outbreak of 1979
Abstract
In April and May 1979, an unusual anthrax epidemic occurred in Sverdlovsk, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Soviet officials attributed it to consumption of contaminated meat. U.S. agencies attributed it to inhalation of spores accidentally released at a military microbiology facility in the city. Epidemiological data show that most victims worked or lived in a narrow zone extending from the military facility to the southern city limit. Farther south, livestock died of anthrax along the zone's extended axis. The zone paralleled the northerly wind that prevailed shortly before the outbreak. It is concluded that the escape of an aerosol of anthrax pathogen at the military facility caused the outbreak.
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Citations
Cited by
Evidence of Airborne Transmission of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Virus
Yu, I. T. S., Li, Y., Wong, T. W., Tam, W., Chan, A. T., Lee, J. H. W., Leung, D. Y. C., & Ho, T. (2004) · New England Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1056/nejmoa032867 · Cited by 1,256
Dixon, T. C., Meselson, M., Guillemin, J., & Hanna, P. C. (1999) · New England Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1056/nejm199909093411107 · Cited by 874
Self-citationTransmissibility of 1918 pandemic influenza
Mills, C. E., Robins, J. M., & Lipsitch, M. (2004) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature03063 · Cited by 796
Blacksell, S. D., Dhawan, S., Kusumoto, M., Le, K. K., Summermatter, K., O’Keefe, J., Kozlovac, J. P., Almuhairi, S. S., Sendow, I., Scheel, C. M., et al. (2024) · The Lancet Microbe · doi:10.1016/s2666-5247(23)00319-1 · Cited by 63
Metadata
- Authors
- Meselson, M., Guillemin, J., Hugh-Jones, M., Langmuir, A., Popova, I., Shelokov, A., & Yampolskaya, O.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 1994-11-18
- Volume
- 266
- Issue
- 5188
- Pages
- 1202-1208
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W2084069113
- Cited by
- 1,006
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 1.96
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Sverdlovsk Anthrax Outbreak of 1979. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1126/science.7973702
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- Meselson, M., Guillemin, J., Hugh-Jones, M., Langmuir, A., Popova, I., Shelokov, A., & Yampolskaya, O. (1994). The Sverdlovsk Anthrax Outbreak of 1979. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7973702
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
