The ‘biological Chernobyl’ lab leak that Russia covered up as ‘food poisoning’: How dozens died frothing at the mouth after anthrax blunder at bioweapons unit

DAILYMAIL.COM • 3h ago

By SABRINA PENTY, FOREIGN NEWS REPORTER 19:29 10 Oct 2026, updated 19:34 10 Oct 2026

In April 1979, dozens of people in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk fell mysteriously ill.

Patients poured into hospitals, and with each ambulance came people coughing up blood and frothing at the mouth.

Others said their lungs felt as though they were on fire, while doctors recorded dangerously high temperatures.

Within two days, they were dead, and panic gripped the city.

Workers began hosing down roofs and disinfecting the streets, while residents hid inside their homes, too afraid to get sick.

Alevtina Nekrasova, whose father died after falling ill, told the Los Angeles Times: ‘Everyone sat at home, with windows and doors shut tight, shivering with fear and waiting for the first symptoms to develop. We all thought we were going to die.’

The deadly outbreak claimed the lives of 66 people, and health officials put the illness down to food poisoning from contaminated meat.

In reality, the disease was the result of an accident at a biological weapons lab that allowed toxic anthrax spores to contaminate Sverdlovsk’s air.

The case would later be dubbed the ‘biological Chernobyl’, but it wasn’t until more than a decade later that the truth came out.

Doctors and relatives of those who died were the first to realise something was not right.

Following the dozens of deaths, autopsies carried out on the victims reportedly found their lungs to be the consistency of jelly, while doctors were ordered to wrap their bodies in polythene and douse them in chlorine.

Teams of men wearing hazmat suits began visiting the families of the people who had died and decontaminated their homes, while the city was put under a temporary curfew.

Meanwhile, health officials ordered that all of the dead be buried together in a single section of the city’s cemetery.

But while Soviet officials worked to eliminate any trace of the outbreak, some foreign newspapers began reporting on rumours of anthrax leaking from a military facility at Sverdlovsk. Western scientists, too, raised suspicions.

US intelligence services stepped in and began reviewing classified data, which led them to accuse the USSR of violating the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.

Soviets denied the claims, and even travelled to the US in 1988 to give a presentation at the National Academy of Sciences, offering figures and slides of gut tissue from autopsies they claimed to have carried out in a bid to put an end to accusations of a biological weapons leak.

However, US intelligence services kept a watchful eye.

Four years later, a team of American scientists travelled to Russia to investigate further and found that in Sverdlovsk, now renamed Yekaterinburg, not everything was as it seemed.

In 1979, Russian pathologists Faina Abramova and Lev Grinberg carried out the autopsies on those who died of the mystery illness.

But when they heard the KGB wanted to look at autopsy records, they defiantly hid tissue samples in jars and preserved them in formaldehyde.

When a team of American scientists led by biologist Matthew Meselson arrived in the Russian town over a decade later, they showed them their original samples.

With this evidence, US scientists were finally able to confirm the victims had died of inhalation anthrax – an infection caused by breathing in the spores of the Bacillus anthracis bacterium – and not intestinal anthrax from eating contaminated meat.

The Americans interviewed families of the victims and local doctors and managed to map out exactly where patients were when they fell ill.

Scientists quickly realised all victims lived downwind of Compound 19 – a bioweapons facility on the outskirts of the city.

And in 1992, when Soviet scientist Ken Alibek defected to the US, he revealed that anthrax had gotten out after an air filter at the Sverdlovsk plant was not replaced.

Alibek was involved in the Soviet Union’s Biopreparat germ-warfare machine, overseeing a secret network of laboratories developing deadly pathogens for use as weapons.

He confirmed that Compound 19 had been mass-producing a lethal, powdered variant known as Anthrax 836, which was being designed for use in ballistic missiles.

The pathogen contaminated sheep and cows and remains the largest documented outbreak of human inhalation anthrax in the world.

While reports say 66 people died, the death toll is likely to be much higher due to Russian authorities trying to cover up the outbreak.

The 1979 anthrax leak serves as a warning of the catastrophic impacts the secret development of bioweapons poses to public safety.

Earlier this month, a young lab worker died after developing a mysterious form of pneumonia in Siberia, and speculation has turned to her place of work.

Darya Shipilova, 28, was working at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute when she fell ill and died soon after, on October 2.

Nearly 200 people who had been in contact with her were placed under quarantine after it emerged that she had broken a test tube.

But while Russian authorities said her death was caused by pneumonia of unknown origin, speculation that she may have contracted the plague has continued to grow.

The uncertainty surrounding the young woman’s death has revived memories of the mysterious outbreak in the former Soviet Union and raises questions over what could be happening inside the remote Siberian lab.

The Anti-Plague Research Institute in Irkutsk is one of dozens of disease labs built to study pathogens.

While on paper, these labs were purely for public health, Russia has been suspected of turning deadly diseases into weapons.

In an interview with the Daily Mail earlier this month, Alibek said: ‘Russia is working on biological weapons, no doubt, otherwise they wouldn’t have built such huge facilities,’ pointing to a recent expansion of Russian biological facilities.

His remarks came after it emerged that a second person had died of the plague in the Irkutsk region earlier this week, according to local media.

Alibek warned that if the two deaths are connected to a laboratory accident, the Kremlin’s playbook of secrecy could make it difficult for the outside world to find out what really happened.

Russia’s health watchdog says investigators found no evidence of an incident involving dangerous pathogens.

However, authorities in Siberia have imposed extensive precautions, with hundreds of people Shipilova had come into contact with placed in quarantine and parts of the hospital where she died restricted.

Anna Popova, head of Russia’s health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, travelled to the region as officials mounted an emergency response.

Rospotrebnadzor said samples taken from Shipilova did not reveal microorganisms linked to her work.

But some reports have claimed that five days before she fell ill, Shipilova accidentally broke a test tube containing Yersinia pestis – the bacterium that causes plague – while working at the institute.

Alibek said the Irkutsk facility sits within a much broader Soviet scientific infrastructure that had links to military research.

During the 1970s and 1980s, he said, Soviet scientists studied natural strains of disease that could have military uses.

If a pathogen appeared particularly deadly or difficult to treat, it was ultimately passed into the hands of Biopreparat, the secret organisation responsible for developing the Soviet Union’s biological weapons, he said.

And plague was one of the pathogens of particular concern.

Alibek has previously described Soviet efforts to create antibiotic-resistant versions of Yersinia pestis as a weapon.

And there is evidence that Russia has been pouring money into some of the same military-linked biological research facilities inherited from the Soviet era.

The US government has assessed that Russia inherited the Soviet offensive biological weapons program and has not provided evidence that it was completely dismantled.

It has also accused Moscow of modernising Soviet-era facilities that could support an offensive program.

One of the sites singled out by US officials is Sergiev Posad-6, a secretive complex northeast of Moscow with a Soviet history of biological weapons research.

Satellite images analysed by the Washington Post showed ten new buildings being constructed there since 2022, covering more than 250,000 square feet, with several appearing to have features associated with high-containment biological laboratories.

The mystery has now attracted attention in Washington.

US officials have stressed that many details remain unconfirmed while urging Russia to share accurate information quickly and openly.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday that the US was ‘watching and monitoring’ the situation closely.

President Donald Trump went further later Monday, saying the US would help Russia if necessary.

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