In case the news has escaped you, the Russians have had a small anthrax outbreak in Siberia, reported today by the BBC. The Russians say it was caused by a thawing reindeer carcass [ another story says 1200 reindeer have died along with a young boy ]. The inconsistencies in stories are nothing new and they have the commonality of all referring to reindeer and thawing, where a lot of anthrax has been contaminating humans. There is anthrax everywhere so it sounds like a reasonable explanation.
It sounds reasonable unless you have heard of Sverdlovsk, where the same explaination accounted for the deaths of thousands of people in 1979. You can read the whole story at http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB61/. In that case, an explosion at a military facility produced enough anthrax in the air to kill most of the casualities. I would be hard pressed to say that was what happened in this case, but I would also not be too quick to accept the thawing reindeer carcass theory. The problem with a lie is, once told, it does not go away. The Russians have lived with this one for about 35 years.
The other problem with a lie is that you lose credibility with any other truth. We might want to check into the sources of this story and start finding out what killed all those reindeer. Can it be an unusually warm winter? Maybe. Can it be another accident? Maybe. The truth is out there somewhere.
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