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On 2 April 1979, a plume of anthrax spores was accidentally released from a secret bioweapons facility in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk. Propelled by a slow wind, the cloud drifted southeast, producing a 50-kilometer trail of disease and death among humans and animals alike. At least 66 people lost their lives, making it the deadliest human outbreak of inhalation anthrax ever.

Now, 37 years later, scientists have managed to isolate the pathogen's DNA from the bodies of two human victims and piece together its entire genome. The study, under review at the journal mBio and released today on the preprint server bioRxiv, answers one of the many remaining questions about the Soviet Union's clandestine biowarfare program by showing that scientists hadn't tinkered with the anthrax strain to make it more resistant to antibiotics or vaccines.

[...] the bacterium produces spores: tiny, dry survival capsules that can lie dormant in the soil for many decades. Spores can be weaponized and delivered by the trillions as an invisible, odorless aerosol. After nestling inside the human lung, they can cause a severe infection that, if not treated with antibiotics, kills 90% of those it infects.

[...] Anthrax is a favorite weapon for bioterrorists as well. In June 1993, members of the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo sprayed the bacterium from a building in Tokyo; luckily, they made a mistake and used a strain that was innocuous to humans. Shortly after the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York City, anthrax powder was mailed to several politicians and journalists on the U.S. East Coast; 22 people were infected and five died.

During the Cold War, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union all had biowarfare programs. The Biological Weapons Convention, which took effect in 1975, was supposed to end that, but in the Soviet Union, a massive clandestine program continued to produce anthrax spores and several other bioagents.

[...] Russia officially agreed (again) to end its bioweapons program in 1992.