WI: Anthrax leak in WWII Britain?

Deleted member 96212

To bring everyone up to speed here, the British government created several highly virulent strains of anthrax from 1942 to 1945, intended to be used as a bio-weapon to retaliate against Germany in the case of chemical warfare. Many people on this site and others agree that had the British government given the plan to utilize anthrax (called Operation Vegetarian) the green light, the European continent would be devastated for decades in a best case scenario and would remain uninhabitable for centuries at worst, with a death toll equivalent or above OTL's World War Two.

So with the extreme virulence of the anthrax spores in mind, how bad could things get in Britain if there was an accidental release of this stuff around 1942, the same year they began testing? Would the British government manage to keep thing contained or would that be it for the UK? How would this affect the rest of the world?
 
I suppose it depends on the method of dispersal. My understanding is that with chemical and biological agents the key problem is delivering the agent over a wide area in a tight timescale. If for example there had been a fire in a research station leading to the dispersal of anthrax spores into the atmosphere I imagine the government would have declared that the downwind area had been contaminated with mustard gas. Plenty of British people in the 1940s were aware of mustard gas and it would have been a plausible cover story.

Any victims would have been closely monitored in hospital and probably cremated, with the next of kin forbidden from talking about the specifics although rumours would probably persist. We know now that the Germans weren't keen on the military use of biological or chemical warfare during the Second World War, but if they suspected that an anthrax attack was imminent they may have decided that they had no other option but to get their nerve gas retaliation in first. In that case the Blitz might have been even more grim.

Obviously if a maniac had loaded anthrax into a cropdusting Lysander and sprayed it at low level over Oxford Street things would have been very different, but that's not plausible. A persistent leak from a storage tank near a population centre might be more likely, but then again it was a war, and the government was prepared to accept civilian casualties, and long-term health problems were low down the list of their priorities in 1940.
 
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The Soviets had at least two serious Anthrax escapes from their labs and those were much nastier post-WW2 strains. The worst of those killed 60 to 100 people (depends who's estimate you believe) and I'd imagine that's probably the upper limit for any British incident.

It's either going to be Portland Down (main research site) or I think Pirbright (saw reference to a lab in Surrey and Pirbright was a major animal health research lab). They aren't middle of nowhere, but they are away from major settlements with big fat exclusion zones around them and those are only going to have been tighter during wartime. I can't see an accidental escapes being that bad and certainly the government will have no trouble keeping things quiet till the war is over, possibly longer if required.
 
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