Quote:Martino-Taylor, a sociology professor at St. Louis Community College, is writing a book on the covert operation and on Tuesday afternoon will present her findings locally for the first time at a colloquium at St. Louis Community College at Meramec.

St. Louis was among several cities where the aerosol testing took place in the 1950s and 1960s with zinc cadmium sulfide, a chemical powder mixed with fluorescent particles so that dispersal patterns could be traced.

After the project became known in Congress in 1994, the Post-Dispatch was among newspapers that combed through newly released documents for details. The documents showed that in 1953 alone, the military conducted 16 tests involving 35 separate releases of zinc cadmium sulfide in St. Louis, many in an area described at the time as "a densely populated slum district."

St. Louisans were told that the government was testing a 'smoke screen" that might protect the city from aerial observation during enemy attack.

If that sounds far-fetched, it was: The Army conceded later that the tests were part of a biological weapons program and that St. Louis was chosen because it roughly matched the population and terrain of Russian cities that the United States might attack.
In 1997, the National Research Council an arm of the National Academy of Sciences minimized the health impacts of the chemical tests but concluded that more analysis was needed. The team of scientists did not consider ethical questions but observed that people were "outraged" at being subjected to chemical testing without their consent.

Martino-Taylor was a skilled researcher before working toward her doctorate, investigating cases of contamination for a St. Louis law firm. The facts she assembled on the military project and conclusions she reached go well beyond anything published earlier.

Relying heavily on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Martino-Taylor identifies connections between participants in the St. Louis testing and scientists who took part in wartime efforts to build the atomic bomb.

Noting postwar efforts to test radioactive materials on Americans, she raises suspicions that the St. Louis testing involved not just materials called harmless by the Army but possibly radioactive isotopes.

Quote:Testing on unwitting civilians;Medical experiments were conducted on a large scale on civilians who had not consented to participate. Often, these experiments took place in urban areas in order to test dispersion methods. Questions were raised about detrimental health effects after experiments in San Francisco, California, were followed by a spike in hospital visits; however, in 1977 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined that there was no association between the testing and the occurrence of pneumonia or influenza.[SUP][56][/SUP] The San Francisco test involved a U.S. Navy ship that sprayed Serratia marcescens from the bay; it traveled more than 30 miles.

Quote:Until the 1950s, S. marcescens was erroneously believed to be a nonpathogenic "saprophyte",[SUP][3][/SUP] and its reddish coloration was used in school experiments to track infections. It has also been used as a simulant in biological warfare tests by the United States Military.[SUP][10][/SUP][SUP][11][/SUP] On September 26 and 27, 1950, the United States Navy conducted a secret experiment named "Operation Sea-Spray" in which some S. marcescens was released by bursting balloons of it over urban areas of the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Although the Navy later claimed the bacteria were harmless[SUP][citation needed][/SUP], beginning on September 29, 11 patients at a local hospital developed very rare, serious urinary tract infections, and one of these individuals, Edward J. Nevin, died. Cases of pneumonia in San Francisco also increased after S. marcescens was released.

Quote:Medical experiments were conducted on a large scale on civilians who had not consented to participate.