9. Bacteria Were Intentionally Sprayed Into San Francisco
During World War II, President Roosevelt realized that he needed to assess the vulnerability of the United States to different forms of attack, including biological attacks with microbes. He created the biological warfare bureau to determine what the weaknesses were and how to address them. What this meant is that, over the course of over 20 years, the government intentionally inundated cities with bacteria, viruses, spores, and other pathogens that they believed would be harmless.
One of the first tests occurred in September 1950, when a navy vessel blasted bacteria into a cloud of fog that was making its way from the San Francisco Bay towards the city itself. Afterward, the government contacted local hospitals to see how many people had been infected. They expected that only a few would have gotten sick and needed hospitalization, but turns out, thousands were hospitalized, and one person may have actually died. Nevertheless, the experiments continued.
In 1966, another one of these biological warfare experiments was conducted in the New York City subways, when light bulbs filled with bacteria known to cause food poisoning were put onto the subway tracks. The idea was to see if the momentum from the trains would propel the pathogens forward. The conclusion: it could. In fact, the bacteria placed at 14th Street were found as far as 59th Street. None of the people riding the subway were compensated for ensuing illness.