1. Stories of the Soviet Anti-Plague System
- Author:
- Raymond A. Zilinskas, James W. Toppin, and Casey W. Mahoney
- Publication Date:
- 09-2013
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies
- Abstract:
- Throughout the 20th century, the USSR Ministry of Health’s 2nd Directorate headed an “anti-plague (AP) system” whose main objective was to protect the country from endemic and imported dread diseases such as plague, anthrax, and others. In addition, it had an important, two-phased role in the Soviet Union’s biological warfare (BW) program—to provide training to the BW program’s scientific workers on biosafety practices and to submit cultures of especially virulent pathogens to that program’s research and development institutions. Because the USSR considered information about endemic infectious disease, as well as BW-related activity, to be state secrets, hardly any outsiders knew about the AP system’s work and scientific accomplishments. To this day, the five Russian AP institutes remain closed to outsiders and are almost as secretive about their current activities as they were during the Soviet era.
- Topic:
- Health, Science and Technology, Public Health, Pandemic, and Medicine
- Political Geography:
- Europe and Soviet Union