Bacillus anthracis Bioterrorism Incident, Kameido, Tokyo, 1993

摘要

In July 1993, a liquid suspension of Bacillus anthraciswas aerosolized from the roof of an eight-story buildingin Kameido, Tokyo, Japan, by the religious group AumShinrikyo. During 1999 to 2001, microbiologic tests wereconducted on a liquid environmental sample originallycollected during the 1993 incident. Nonencapsulated iso-lates of B. anthracis were cultured from the liquid.Multiple-locus, variable-number tandem repeat analysisfound all isolates to be identical to a strain used in Japan tovaccinate animals against anthrax, which was consistentwith the Aum Shinrikyo members' testimony about thestrain source. In 1999, a retrospective case-detection sur-vey was conducted to identify potential human anthraxcases associated with the incident, but none were found.The use of an attenuated B. anthracis strain, low sporeconcentrations, ineffective dispersal, a clogged spraydevice, and inactivation of the spores by sunlight are alllikely contributing factors to the lack of human cases