The island of Anthrax, the secret island of the Sea Aral
It is probable that nobody has almost heard speak of the Vozrozhdeniya island. In fact, the island has stopped existing like so, and is not known by causes that few could imagine: the sea surrounds that it has turned literally into a desert, but in addition, its name locks up one of the secrets better kept during the Cold War.
The place, an island in a region little inhabited, was chosen in 1948 by the Soviet government like the ideal to outdoors install a secret extreme laboratory of experimentation with biological weapons, known only in circles authorized under the Aralsk-7 name. Located to 3500 kilometers of Moscow, in an inner sea surrounded by a desert little inhabited, the Vozrozhdeniya island got to contain a true city without at least appearing in no map. Patrolled during decades by boats that they avoided that nobody could approach, in their interior, tests with biological agents were realised that they included different plagues, anthrax, fever Q, and botulism, among others. Some agents until had been modified genetically, to make them resistant to existing medecines.
Left in 1990 after the Soviet fall next to a gigantic garbage dump of bacteria anthrax, the island, began with the years to surround itself by an extensive desert, when the ecological disaster of the Sea Aral made descend in alarming form the level of waters because of the abusive programs from irrigation in the region.
Thus it increased up to ten times its size. The insular location prevented the transmission of dangerous microorganisms to the neighboring countries of the continental zones during decades. But the computational error and the negligence could not anticipate that the island, would dangerously be united to the continent in 2003, transforming itself into one of the more toxic zones of environmental disaster of the world. The capacity to survive in extreme conditions of esporas of anthrax is a latent threat for the life in all the region. In fact, recent expeditions of control realised by North American agencies, detected flights in some of the containers. From year 2002, Uzbekistan and the USA signed a collaboration agreement to decontaminate the island, financing programs that arrived to neutralize the anthrax garbage dump. The race between the disappearance of the Sea Aral and the decontamination is ruined since then.
At the moment, the zone is restricted the visitors, although assiduously it is visited by plunderers. The old town and the laboratories, have the aspect of a true ghost city, crushed by an eternal silence. Its bad fame has been worth him the present name of “the anthrax island”. Ironically, the translation of the original name of the island, means “Renaissance”. Not very often a name was so unfortunate.
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