Marina Kozlova – Asia Water Wire*
NUKUS, Jul 26 2006 (IPS) – Until about 15 years ago, very little was known about the Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea, except that it was a top-secret testing site for Soviet biological weapons.
Today, the island which has now turned into a peninsula following the drying up of the Aral has become a public health time bomb because of germ residues that scientists say could still be lingering there.
Vozrozhdeniye is a time bomb (in the Aral Sea region) that could cause serious problems in the future, says Gappar Asenov, head of the zoological and parasitological laboratory at the Karakalpakstan Centre for Prophylaxis of Quarantinable and Most Hazardous Infections.
The former Soviet Union first tested biological weapons at Vozrozhdeniye in the 1930s and used the island for building its biological weapons stockpile until 1991 when the country disintegrated into 15 independent states.
The germs that were tested at open-air sites on the island included those causing anthrax, tularemia, brucellosis, plague, typhus, Q-fever, botulinum toxin and Venezuelan equine encephalitis.
Soviet scientists were known to have used horses, monkeys, sheep, donkeys, mice, guinea pigs and hamsters for the testing the effects of the germ-based weapons.
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The Aral Sea was once the world s fourth largest inland water body -after the Caspian Sea between Europe and Asia, Lake Superior in North America and Lake Victoria in Africa. But it began to dry in the 1960s after huge amounts of water were drawn for irrigating cotton fields.
Today, the newly independent states continue irrigation-intensive cotton farming in addition to using water for other purposes.
The Aral Sea s water volume, say experts, has shrunk by almost 90 percent to 115 billion cubic metres and its surface area has shrunk by 73 percent to 17,600 sq km. The sea has now been bisected into two giant lakes, known as the Small Aral, in Kazakhstan, and the Big Aral, which is shared by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Not only has the declining water level caused a strip of land to appear to connect Vozrozhdeniye with the Uzbek mainland but also the peninsula is growing wider every year. The new land bridge now threatens to become a transit corridor for infected animals to carry the germs to the mainland.
Burrowing rodents, carrying plague such as the Libyan Jird, or Meriones libycus and common mice are in abundance on the island, says Asenov. One way to prevent their migration is to build a 10km rodent-proof ring around Vozrozhdeniye, he adds.
Scientists are uncertain about the exact nature of the threat caused by bio-weapon residues, but they have no means to certify that the island is contamination free.
Raymond Zilinskas, director of the chemical and biological weapons non-proliferation programme at the centre for non-proliferation studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, California, United States, is among those who argue there is not enough evidence to prove that the animals carry the plague, for instance.
Some scientists believe that local rodents that were exposed to weapons grade bubonic plague bacteria transmitted by fleas among animals and could still be carriers. But there is no data on the level of contamination, he says.
Another potential threat is anthrax, an infectious disease that can be used as a biological weapon.
Bakhtiyar Zhollybekov, a professor of soil sciences at the Nukus branch of the Tashkent Agrarian University, said the mother of one of his acquaintances had died due to anthrax in the 1970s.
However, there is no evidence to suggest a relationship between the incidents of anthrax 30 years ago and testing on the Vozrozhdeniye, adds Asenov.
In 2002, a team from the Defence Threat Reduction Agency of the U.S. Department of Defence, deposited anthrax stocks in 11 concrete-lined pits and mixed it with calcium hypochlorite a decontamination agent under a joint U.S.-Uzbek clean up effort. In essence, the U.S. scientists repeated the operation conducted by Soviet troops in the late 1980s when they had mixed anthrax with bleach.
Tests of the anthrax bacteria buried on the island by Soviet troops showed that some were still alive and virulent even after 10 years, says Zilinskas.
Under adverse conditions, anthrax strains change into spores that can survive for over 100 years. Such spores can become active when they come in contact with living organisms.
Zilinskas adds there is evidence to suggest that the soil, flora, and fauna on the island had been contaminated with disease-causing germs, though most of the germs were eliminated over time because of dehydration and exposure to (ultraviolet) light.
Scientists say continuous environmental monitoring is necessary to test the soil and life forms on Vozrozhdeniye island for tracking disease-causing germs that could still be surviving, and could eventually threaten human beings.
The island is now accessible to residents of Kazakhstan s adjoining areas and will be opened to people living in northern Uzbekistan within two or three years, an Uzbek expert who preferred not to be named, said in an interview.
He visited Vozrozhdeniye in May when he had noticed that equipment, building materials and scrap metal left behind by the Soviets were being stolen.
(*Asia Water Wire is a series of news and features, coordinated by IPS Asia-Pacific, on water and development from the region.)
