Published on: Sunday, July 08, 1984
Secret germ tests were held on Isles
By Sandra Oshiro
Advertiser Government Bureau
The military conducted open-air, simulated biological warfare experiments in Hawaii during the 1960s, using live bacteria — thought at the time to be harmless — according to declassified documents obtained by The Honolulu Advertiser.
Experts now say, however, that some of the bacteria might be hazardous to hospital patients, the aged and those susceptible to disease.
The public never was told about the test. State officials know only that the Army had asked to conduct some experiments on "meteorological" conditions on the Big Island.
A key health offical at the time said he does not remember being told about any of the experiments, including one in which bacteria was sprayed over Oahu.
Walter Quisenberry, the deputy health director for 1963 until his appointment as director in 1966, said it wasn't likely that the military told state officals anything about its secret experiments.
State forester Libert Landgraf when told that the Army experimented with bacteria on public land in its Big Island tests, said he was shocked. If the true nature of the experiments had been known, the state probably would have rejected the Army's request to lease the site, he said.
The Army has admitted experimenting with chemical agents in the 1960s. The disclosure of the chemical tests came after military spokesmen first denied, then acknowledged that nerve gas had been tested on the Big Island.
But the release of the biological test documents appears to be the military's first acknowledgement that it also conducted field tests of simulated germ warfare agents in Hawaii.
Army spokesman Maj. Donald Maple said June 29 that, since 1969, the military has conducted no open-air biological testing in the United States, including Hawaii. The domestic experiments were stopped when then-President Richard Nixon renounced the use of biological weapons.
According to test reports obtained by The Advertiser under the Freedom of Information Act, Hawaii was used in experiments with three types of bacteria.
The Army believed at the time that the bacteria posed no health risk, but all three now are classified as having at least limited pathogenic — or disease-causing — potential. Although the bacteria are not dangerous to healthy adults, experts widely believe they could be harmful to certain people.
One germ — Serratia marcescens — has been found within the past two decades to be a "significant human pathogen," according to medical literature.
Dr. Francis Pien of Straub Hospital said Serratia might cause illness or complications in those medically "compromised." That is, they are vulnerable because they might be fighting cancer, for example.
Regardless of wether the Army thought its tests were harmless, the experiments raise an important ethical issue, said Sanford Siegel, a University of Hawaii environmental biologist.
Basically, he said, Hawaii served as an involuntary participant in the simulated biological warfare tests. Its citizens were used as guinea pigs, he said.
"It seems to me that our constitutional rights at least were threatened by agencies of the government that we elect to represent our interest," Siegel said.
The three types of bacteria were used iin similar secret experiments, which have come to light only in recent years, conducted on the Mainland in the 1950s and 1960s.
One experiment with Serratia in 1950 prompted a lawsuit filed by the family of a San Francisco man. The family claims that the man died of a heart infection linked to bacteria used in the military's open-air experiments.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently declined to review a lower-court ruling against the family.
The military has said the timing of the man's death and the open-air experiments was coincidental.
The government had a similar response to reports that pneumonia rates rose sharply in on Alabama county following Serratia experiments in 1952. The Anniston Star reported in 1981 that the Army conducted the tests despite debate among its own officers over the safety of Serratia.
State records that might indicate any possible connection between local tests and health problems at the time are unavailable or nonexistent.
Health officials say they don't have records showing any increases in Serratia pneumonia, for example, because it is not one of the diseases the department requires hospitals and doctors to report. And one major Oahu hospital said it does not keep records dating back to the 1960s, when the experiments were carried out.
At least six sets of experiments were held in the Islands between February 1963 and October 1967, according to Army documents. Once was conducted on Oahu, four in open ocean off Oahu and another on state land in th Big Island's Olaa Forest Reserve.
The tests appear to be part of a larger program of government open-air experiments using simulated biological warfare agents conducted between 1949 and 1969.
In a report to a Senate subcommitee in 1977, the Army said its domestic tests were conducted to find out how best to wage biological germ warfare and how to defend against it.
It is not clear what primary purpose the military had in mind when it conducted its experiments over Oahu. The first objective of the "Big Tom" tests still is classified.
But a secondary purpose, according to the report, was to investigate the "diffusion and downwind travel of biological and FP (flourescent powder) tracer aerosols over land and water."
The Army sprayed Bacillus subtilis var. niger — or Bactillus globigii — over Oahu, Army reports indicate. Globigii generally is regarded by experts as harmless but sometimes can cause eye lesions, according to medical literature.
Experimenters released globigii at least 39 times between may 24 and June 12, 1963. It drifted over the island, then was collected in samples and taken at several stations, such as Schofield Barracks and Honolulu.
Army censors did not release the results of the Big Tom experiments.
Other Hawaii experiments were conducted in open ocean, away from population centers.
The purpose of on set of experiments at sea, according to a declassified report, was to simulate a defense against a biological warfare attack on American ships in open ocean.
Globigii was sprayed by jets or by a blower mounted on a tugboat upwind of target ships. Samples then were taken throughout the contaminated ships to see how far the bacteria had penetrated.
In another set of experiments, subjects on board the ships wore special masks designed to take in bacteria samples. After the experiments, the subjects took showers to be decontaminated, the report said.
Similar experiments between Oahu and Kauai were conducted several years later, using two other types of bacteria.
In the summer of 1966, the Army released Serratia marcescens and another bacteria, Escherichia coli, 80 miles south-west of Oahu over open ocean. Samples again were taken throughout target ships stationed downwind.
The open ocean experiments would not be of concern to Hawaii's civilian population except for the possibility that some of the bacteria could have survived and drifted ashore on wind and sea currents.
Of the three bacteria used in Army test here, E. coli is the most common in the environment. When water is contaminated by sewage, officials test for it. According to medical literature, the bacteria might cause septic infection and diarrea.
The evidence against Serratia is more damning. The bacteria have been blamed for pneumonia outbreaks, particularly among hospital patients. Serratia also has been linked to a heart ailment called endocarditis.
According to the Anniston Star, the Army appointed a committee after the death of the San Francisco man to find out if open-air Serratia experiments should be stopped.
The committee recommended that the military continue using Serratia, even over populated areas. But it advised the Army to monitor the experiments to determine if any resulting health problems were coincidental or directly tied to the test.
The Army's documents do not say whether the military conducted such monitoring in the Hawaii experiments and a Pentagon spokesman said he could not immediately say whether such monitoring was carried out.
By 1969, according to news reports, the military officially acknowledged that Serratia had "limited pathogenic (disease causing) capabilities and should not be used for the study of experimental infections in man ..."
It also was at that time that President Nixon imposed a moratorium on all biological agent testing, according to the Army spokesman.
One of the latest of the Hawaii experiments was conducted between June 1964 and October 1967, about five miles from the Kulani prison camp on the Big Island.
When the Army asked for permission to use th forest reserve location in 1964, it said only that it would be conducting "meterological and tracer tests," according to state land board records.
The next year, the Army received a five-year lease to conduct more tests, this time for "classified meterological and related test."
The Army's descriptions of its experiments technically were not inaccurate, although they didn't tell the full story.
State officials were dismayed when they found out some years ago that the Army had been experimenting with toxic nerve gas between 1966 and 1967. Landgraf, then the Big Island district forester, said recently that it comes as double "shockaroo" to learn that the Army tested bacteria in the forest as well.
The experiments, code-named "Yellow Leaf," amounted to dropping bomblets containing globigii from different heights and watching how germs were distributed.
Shortly after the "meterological" experiments, state officials conducted an inspection of the site to make sure everything was in order. Landgraf said there was nothing amiss that they could see.
Several years after the news broke on the nerve gas tests, the Army asked the state to release it from "all actions, liabilities and claims against the United States and its officers" in connection with its use of the forest land.
A state attorney advised the land board to deny the request. Instead, the land board agreed not to hold the federal government responsible for any claims other than those not linked to "injury or death to persons or to livestock resulting from the use of the area for nerve or other lethal gases."
Nothing was said about biological agents.
