This week’s fourth season premiere of The Americans kicked off in typical fashion, which is to say: It was slow and methodical, taking its sweet time developing characters and building the story. It’s a great show — one of the best on television — but also one that requires a great deal of patience, which is probably why it hasn’t yet received the awards recognition it so richly deserves.
One of the more compelling developments this season came as a result of a new character played by Dylan Baker, a Russian spy posing as an American researcher. In the season premiere, Baker’s character gave Phillip Jennings a little vial of something he picked up from the Department of Defense’s bioweapons lab. The vial contained a bacteria called Burkholderia mallei, which causes a disease called “glanders,” which the character describes as “to meningitis what bubonic plague is to a runny nose.”
In other words, glanders is a messed-up bacteria.
Interestingly, however, glanders is something that has been experimented with as a weapon since World War I. It primarily affects horses, and the Germans used it in World War I to infect horses and other livestock being sent from neutral countries to the allies, including the United States. The disease has been known to wipe out thousands of horses at a time and was used to debilitate the Allies who relied heavily on horses and mules.
https://twitter.com/erincmccarthy/status/710311861489672194
Glanders does not spread from horses to humans easily. However, it can easily be aerosolized and spread through the air, where humans can contract it. It can be lethal, and there is no vaccine available (however, lengthy treatments with certain antibiotics have proven effective against it). A human who gets glanders can come down with fatigue, fevers, chills, malaise, diarrhea, pus-filled sores and eventually pneumonia. If left untreated, a person will die within 10 days of infection.
It’s a gruesome disease. Trust me, you don’t want to do an image search. (DO NOT CLICK ON THAT LINK.)
For that reason, glanders was also investigated by both the United States and Russia for use as a biological weapon. In the United States, such a weapon never materialized. However, the former Soviet Union produced more than 2,000 tons of it in a single year in the 1980s.
In other words, it sounds like an extremely unpleasant way to die, but during the Cold War, that’s the kind of insane biological weaponry both the United States and the Soviet Union experimented with.
Fortunately, cases of glanders are very rare in humans, although lab researchers experimenting with the bacteria have been known to come down with the disease. However, it continues to pose a threat to horses.
