7 Norway, 1917
During the First World War, German baron Karl Otto von Rosen was arrested in Norway under suspicion of espionage. Seventy years later forensic analysts uncovered glass vials of anthrax spores hidden among his confiscated belongings.
Charts & Graphs
Weapons of Mass Infection
“Biological warfare is essentially public health and preventive medicine in reverse.”—Maj. Gen. William M. Creasy
1 Arzawa, c. 1320 bc
Diseased sheep that appeared suddenly in the Anatolian kingdom of Arzawa might have been sent by nearby Hittites as revenge for a previous attack. Texts suggest the livestock suffered from tularemia, a bacterial disease that can jump from animals to humans.
2 Cyzicus, 74 bc
Pontic king Mithridates abandoned his attack on the Roman-allied city after its residents began throwing the corpses of plague victims over the city walls, infecting his soldiers. It remains unknown whether the Cyzicans intended this outcome.
3 Tortona, 1155
During the siege of Tortona, Holy Roman emperor Frederick I ordered human and animal corpses to be dumped into a spring that served as the garrison’s only water supply.
4 Crimea, 1346
In an apocryphal story, Mongol besiegers catapulted diseased cadavers over the walls of Kaffa, causing an outbreak of plague in the fortified trading hub. The Black Death made its way from there to Western Europe via flea-infested rats hiding in the ships of Genoese merchants.
5 Pittsburgh, 1763
At the recommendation of General Jeffery Amherst, the British provided blankets from Fort Pitt’s smallpox infirmary to the soldiers of Chief Pontiac’s confederacy under the guise of a peace offering.
6 Washington, DC, 1863
Confederate physician Luke Blackburn is alleged to have plotted to sell the clothing and bedding of yellow fever victims to the North. At least one Union officer became ill after purchasing undergarments in the capital.
8 Manchuria, c. 1930
After refusing to ratify the Geneva Protocol, Japan’s Army Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory (better known as Unit 731) began to develop bioweapons, which they debuted a decade later when they released rats and fleas infected with bubonic plague into China.
9 Sverdlovsk, 1979
Workers at the USSR’s Compound 19 military microbiology research lab accidentally released a cloud of anthrax spores while transferring samples into containers. The resulting epidemic affected a 2.5-mile range around the facility, killing at least sixty-four people.
10 Wasco County, OR, 1984
During the lead-up to municipal elections, cult followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, hoping to seize control of the local government, contaminated salad bars at ten restaurants with salmonella bacteria. Forty-five people were hospitalized.
11 Namibia, 1989
Former Civilian Cooperation Bureau operative Petrus Jacobus Botes claimed to have been ordered to contaminate the water supply of the Dobra refugee camp with cholera and yellow fever. The attempt apparently failed due to the high chlorine content of the water.
12 San Antonio, 2020
U.S. prosecutors charged a Texas man with perpetrating a hoax related to biological warfare, a federal crime, for claiming on social media that he had paid his Covid-19-positive cousin to lick items at a local grocery store.
