Slashdot Mirror
Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox
Tucker clearly wrote the book believing that the use of smallpox as a biological weapon was a worrisome, but not especially likely, threat, and on September 10th, most of us would not only have concurred, but would probably never have thought that such a thing could happen; after all, smallpox remains the only infectious disease to have been eradicated by humans. After reading Scourge, you will be grateful that the mysterious sender of anthrax-laced mail doesn't have the power of this infinitely worse pestilence in his or her hands.
The smallpox virus, or variola, is a biscuit-shaped bundle of DNA and protein casing, so tiny it can only be viewed with an electron microscope, yet devastating to the human body. The disease kills up to thirty percent of its victims and leaves the rest permanently scarred after battling fever, nausea, and boils so painful that thirsty patients often refused water, unable to swallow without excruciating hurt. Perhaps to be merciful, Tucker has included no photographs of suffering victims covered in the gruesome pustules of the disease, but should you have a morbid curiosity to see one, visit the Polio Eradication Photo Gallery.
Scourge is not a story about a virus, however; it is a story about people. Tucker tells of the history of smallpox and civilizations, how political machinations combined with idealism to bring about the global cooperation that removed smallpox from the earth, and the elaborate subterfuge used by the Soviet Union to hide its research on smallpox as a potential biological weapon. Fans of Laurie Garrett's (The Coming Plague, Betrayal of Trust) journalistic style will appreciate Tucker's treatment; the major figures in the history of smallpox are presented in terms of their personalities and personal struggles, rather than in simple obituary-style listings of what they did.
In describing the early history of the disease, Scourge is fascinating. You may have known that smallpox helped Hernando Cortes conquer the Aztecs in the sixteenth century, but perhaps you didn't know that smallpox may have been the Athenian epidemic Thucydides describes in his account of the Peloponnesian war. The superstitions that existed prior to the germ theory of disease - and, in some areas, long enough to hinder the last stages of the smallpox eradication campaign in the late 1970s - seem truly impossible now, but such was belief prior to the germ theory of disease.
The conquering of smallpox remains one of the great triumphs of mankind - the only infectious disease successfully eradicated by humans. The history of the eradication campaign is one of cooperation between nations and between scientists, but it is also a story of obstacles placed in the way by reluctant governments, the rapid spread of disease due to world travel, and the stubbornness of the superstitious. Here, you will meet such figures as D.A. Henderson, the reluctant leader of the World Health Organization campaign, and Viktor Zhdanov, the man who first proposed a global eradication campaign to the WHO in 1958, then, ironically, became the first chairman of the Soviet council that oversaw the secret biowarfare program beginning in the 1970s.
The clash between the traditional openness of the scientific community, where information is shared relatively freely, and the secretiveness of bureaucracies, where being in the know is a mark of power, is a recurring theme. Often, you'll find yourself rooting for the researchers, who frequently had to reason with government officials who knew nothing about science, but you may be surprised to find yourself agreeing with the government - specifically, the Department of Defense - a time or two.
The story of the Soviet Union's successful cover-up of its research into the use of smallpox as a biological weapon is unsettling, to say the least. Do you find the aftermath of a nuclear bomb impressive? Imagine that bomb followed by an ICBM bearing smallpox - a disease that kills nearly a third of its victims in a normal situation, but would be attacking survivors of a nuclear attack, whose immune systems would be severely compromised by radiation damage. Lest you think that earlier vaccinations might have helped, the smallpox vaccine is effective for only about ten years before revaccination is required, and the United States had stopped mandatory vaccinations long before the last known case of naturally occurring smallpox was diagnosed in 1978. Such a warhead was one of the foci of the Soviet program, even as facilities were carefully disguised so as to give the appearance of compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention treaty. Western governments did not learn of the full scope of the Soviet effort until 1989, and kept the information classified until former Soviet smallpox research scientist Ken Alibek (ne Kanatjan Alibekov) told the story to the American press in 1998.
Although, officially, the last remaining stores of variola virus are kept in Moscow and at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Tucker raises the possibility that other governments - particularly Iraq - may have retained secret stores of smallpox virus, citing enough circumstantial evidence to keep his speculation from being easily discounted. He also brings up the possibility that a government might, to avoid the certain retaliation that would come from launching a smallpox attack, supply the virus to a group like al-Qaeda, then deny responsibility when the terrorists release the disease. Tucker finished documenting these speculations well before the September 11th attacks; now, one hopes they aren't prophetic.
In the case of smallpox, the truth is as morbidly fascinating as any fiction could possibly be, and Tucker tells the story of those who fought to end the scourge and those who would have preserved it as a weapon with equal aplomb, yet from the perspective of a world where smallpox was a piece of history and sophisticated biological attack a back-burner phenomenon. Now that fears of biological warfare are all too real, Scourge is exceptionally relevant - and hopefully not a prediction of what is to come.
You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.
Scientific American, Dec 1996
http://www.sciam.com/1296issue/1296cole.html
Living Terrors
Living Terrors
by Michael T. OsterholmPh.D., former Minnesota State Epidemiologist, and John Schwartz, a science reporter for The Washington Post.
Lays out scenarios for anthrax and smallpox, some history of biowar, why public health system needs to be restored.
The Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies:
home
Smallpox
CDC reports on smallpox attack scenarios:
The scenario
Aftermath of a Hypothetical Smallpox Disaster
Part Two
CDC
Home
S,mallpox
Picture
Modeling Attacks
Public Health Links:
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
by Laurie Garrett
Covers emerging and re-emerging diseases such as HIV, Ebola, Tuberculosis, Smallpox.
Betrayal of Trust : The Collapse of Global Public Health
by Laurie Garrett, Steven M. Wolinsky
How the public health system, in USA and abroad, was allowed to disintegrate.
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
by Randy Shilts
A chronicle of the first 5 years of the aids epidemic.
Richard Preston (Hot Zone author) on smallpox
Best Slashdot Co
Chicken soup books will start selling again because people are going to be scared of getting chicken pox.
Sheesh! There's no more of a biological terror threat than there was 15 years ago. People are so paranoid.
The New Yorker's The Demon in the Freezer is mirrored at Cryptome, and is an excellent online read about smallpox; it takes about half an hour. And it is truly disturbing.
If you only read a few parts, read two things:
- the part where Russian scientists warn western observers that "your vaccines won't protect you" against the Soviet's new breed of smallpox.
- the part about insect poxviruses, which turn caterpillars into pure crytstallized virus.
Blech. I hope we have the courage as a nation to go ahead and make the vaccine, in mass quantities, the same way it used to be made. The main objection raised in the article is that "by today's standards" cow puss is an unacceptable vaccine. Hopefully "today's standards" are that life without a vaccine is unacceptable. But that's just my opinion.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
Slightly off topic, the anthrax attacks.
Does anyone else wonder why they just seem to have stopped all of a sudden.
Did the person(s) sending the letters run out of anthrax? Or perhaps was this just a first phase? Just a small scale experiment to see how a controlled release of antrax spreads.
I just wish the whole small pox idea was never brought up. But I guess with this book having been released even before the initial attacks, the thought was on someone's mind. I just feel now every time someone talks about small pox being used in a biological attack it increases the chances of it happening (I guess I'm not helping any).
There is NO threat of smallpox being released into the public. By 1979, the WHO completely wiped-out smallpox in the wild. The only living strains of smallpox in existance are located a highly secured CDC laboratory, and in a lab in Russia. There is almost NO chance of this illness being re-released into the wild. Anyone who says otherwise is just trying to capitalize on the fear and paranoia of the public.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Whats really scary is that smallpox is so contagious that a single Al Qaida terrorist could infect himself and walk around in New York. He could potentialy infect thousands of people.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
You can thank the US government for its biological warfare research in the early 50's to late 60's for giving terrorists so many good ideas...
I can see it now, millions die after infected musquitos unleashed on the US...
BAH!
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
When I read something like this review, I experience twinges of fear. Smallpox sounds like it is truly terrible. And yet, somehow, we, the people of this world, did manage to get rid of it. For the future of the world, we need to recognize that we are one people first, and citizens of a nation second. This doesn't mean we all need to believe the same things, etc. This is about unity in diversity. And unity isn't abstract: its about action. Getting rid of smallpox was an example of unity in diversity. The people of the world got rid of it. Now, can we get rid of AIDS? Can we get rid of Malaria? What about our physical environment? What about nuclear weapons? What about poverty? These are things that can only be solved with unity of action.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
There was a episode of Nova about the very same topic last night on our local PBS affiliate. Quite disturbing, especially in regards to the experiments of the Soviet Union even after global treaties had been signed.
The pictures of smallpox victims were even more disturbing.
Check out the schedule, maybe it's on again, for those interested.
That the US government is currently working on a program to vaccinate the entire population against smallpox and anthrax, and that they just aren't talking about it because they can't do it immediately, and talking about a program they can't carry out would only cause panic.
But I doubt it. I am guessing the powers that be are hoping that the biowar threat has "calmed down" and that we are going "back to normal". In this scenario, mass vaccination won't be considered until after the next major outbreak, when it might be too late.
We'll see.
sPh
...to the /. crowd.
We are really only interested in the threat by the demented crapflooder virus.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I couldn't possibly agree with you more with the perspective on the evolution of life on the planet. Humans have had (by far) the worst impact on the ecosystem of the planet. I sometimes wonder if it is unfortunate that humans are so resillient. I believe that this is a temporary phase in our development as a species, and, in a few thousand years, we'll probably be over it.
Smallpox and Anthrax (and any other biological threat) are just developmental instigators, promoting alteration of perspective on the planet as a whole, and our lives in particular. Hopefully these recent "threats", rather than being forever looked at as a tragedy (like the response to polio, the Black Death, and concentration camps during WW2), will spur a new era of enlightened insight into our role in the community of life on this planet.
I know this is slightly offtopic, but I downloaded a Carlin MP3 from an HBO show from 1999 that I never saw or heard before. The first ten minutes he talked about terrorists and how they're not going to be stupid enough to use a bomb, but they'll take knives and dozens of other weapons that the airlines would let you take on board. He then went into talking about how we'd all be afraid of anthrax in our drinking water.
I know it's just comedy, but he's a smart guy and that was just a little creepy hearing about this stuff from a 2 year old recording.
I guess we didn't bomb Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan in the last 15 years. Nor did $300M of Saudi inheritance and an organization devoted to the destruction of the USA (and by proxy, our Western allies) spring up. Right?
The huge difference between an entity like the Soviet Union and a network like Al Qaeda is that, while the USSR was highly prepared and enamored of the will to power, the people holding the reins were not particularly interested in dying as a means of killing others. So while the cynical machinations of the Soviet power elite produced the finest weaponization programs for biowarfare yet seen, they were only intended for use as mop-up agents after a nuclear attack.
The Islamic fundies (not particularly worse than Christian fundies or ultranationalist Israelis, just more prominent) that have taken center stage lately are perfectly willing to die for their cause, as long as they can kill a few unarmed women and children while they're at it. What better for the slaughter of innocents than an epidemic? It worked for Genghis Khan (cf. catapulting plague-ridden corpses into sieged cities). These are not conventional enemies and they are not limiting themselves to conventional warfare. Moreover, a network of semi-autonomous individuals without a distinct nationality, i.e., nothing to lose, is a much more elusive target than a static nation-state like Iraq, Libya, or Afghanistan. So the consequences of being "caught" are also different.
That, in conjunction with the underfunding and collapse of the public health systems around the world, is why I submit that a response to biowarfare is more crucial now than 15 years ago.
And the rebuilding of a worldwide public health infrastructure would be a damn nice side effect of this new urgency, IMHO.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
Didn't the Soviets conduct research into musepox as a more contaigous virulaent agent? I seem to recall the lethality of the modified mousepox as high as 95%.
If you look back, you see that the US stopped vaccinating for smallpox well before it was wiped out in other countries.
The reason is that the known vaccine is not without its own risks. A very small possibility of death, but a lot of side effects, including severe illness, tissue loss and disfigurement, and so on. Low rates, measured in very small numbers pr hundred thousand, but over a national population of some 350 million, that adds up, and there would surely be some deaths.
We dont want to use that vaccine unless we have to; killing our fellow citizens is a thing to be avoided.
You're kidding yourself if you think that unemployed scientists from the Soviet biopreparat program would be totally unwilling to cart out some specimens and go work for another nation, provided the pay was good enough.
Inspections of the Soviet and Iraqi research facilities in the 1990's indicated that both had been actively working on biological agents. Yeltsin went ahead and publicly stated this, then dismantled the Russian programs. Hussein, of course, has not called any press conferences on the matter.
So, you are stating that both US military inspectors and the former president of Russia are liars. You need to provide some solid evidence of your position in order to be taken seriously!
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
Weel, if a spallpox epidemeic does break out we could always vaccinate ourselves, comn the did it first in what 1711 , find someone that has survived it but still has pustules, scratch your skin and rub.....well then again the first guy who tried this
:)
son died a few years later from tuberculosis contracted from the pus donor. and he followed shortly after.....turns out syphilis was spread during a time more through smallpox vaccination than sexual contact....then again forget it Im a lucky bastard 70 % is good odds right ?
But seriously, if an epidemic were to break out why not, after screening of the donor, use the same methods the used nearly 300 years ago, off the shelf vaccine may be in short supply now , but could you imagine if an epidemic did hit ?
God knows all the politicians, doctors, lawyers would get "Priority"
Could you imagine a world where the only healthy individuals are Politicians,Layers, and Cops ?
We could call it the RIAAUS
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
while you're at it.
The use of biological agents in war is as old as war itself.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
IANAD, but it seems to me that the smallpox threat is a bit overblown. The victory over smallpox was in large part due to the characteristics of the disease itself: short incubation period, very visible presentation. These characteristics would also make it easier to fight in the case of a terrorist attack.
FWIW, my Dad had mild case of smallpox as a child. He was not horribly disfigured nor did he describe it as particularly uncomfortable as diseases go.
the french government has decided to pile up the stock of vaccins against variola (smallpox).
t ml
This disease has been out of the world for more than 20 years but since the anthrax thing in the US, this preventive measure was put together. After all, the vaccine is cheap to produce and effective for 10 years.
More information on http://www.lemonde.fr/rech_art/0,5987,238690,00.h
(the text is in french, babelfish comes to your help).
A. Marchand
I don't know why everyone is so focused on smallbox, even if it's an awful disease.
Ken Alibek (formerly Kantajin Alibekov) who was the deputy director of the immense Soviet Biopreparat biowarfare research and manufacture organizion defected to the US in the early 90's, and has written a book on it as well as testifying to congress and having been thoroughly debriefed on the Soviet program.... They worked on a whole slew of biological weapons including things like marlburg virus (similar to ebola) that would make you wish you only had smallpox!
The Soviets stockpiled weaponized smallpox, plague, marlburg, tularemia etc in quantities of tens of tons each! They aqpparently killed around 100,000 nazis with tularemia in the Battle of Stalingrad.
First paragraph: Reading between the lines, it sounds like bullshit. They appear to be keeping these stocks as some sort of sick deterrent because North Korea is rumored to have some, as well. Brilliant.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
I remember when I had the smallpox as a kid. That was one nasty week. I remember the doctors had to take a lot of skin samples to create the anti-bodies. Recent research has shown that smallpox can treated by exposing the body to high levels of high-frequency electro-magnetic waves, such as are given off by most TV sets.
That's true, if there is an outbreak. If there is not, then people are risking injury and death for no benefit.
I was vaccinated twice, once in childhood and again in the Army, but the latter was 15 years ago. The vaccine does wear off after 10-20 years.
Best Slashdot Co
Frontline special: Plague Wars
This is the most balanced, incisive, and original presentation I've seen on the topic. It was written several years ago and was not rushing to meet some deadline or focused on the current agent du jour. It's fantastic.
Anyone who likes Laurie Garrett's work (or Ken Alibek's) will find this site worth digging into, deeply.
Have "fun".
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
Australians scientists found that by adding a single gene to mousepox they can create a 100% lethal virus (even to resistant mice), with the effect of vaccines being greatly reduced. It is thought that the gene placed in smallpox would have a similarly devastating effect on humans. heres an article and another.
I haven't read the Smallpox book reviewed here. But if you're interested in the history of disease, I heartily recommend Rats, Lice and History. Not a boring text, it meanders all over the place with a very dry wit and makes a truly horrible subject enjoyable to read about.
Another way to treat smallpox is to stand on your head while being next to a portable power generator. The generator creates a lot of EMF waves and standing on your head causes your blood to flow more freely, thus releasing pheramones which attract the EMF waves and cause quicker recover.
for thoughts in @rant do
If one looks to history one can find a myriad of ways wars could have been prevented. Could this war have been prevented if such broad public apathy wasn't the song of the day? Must every war be so brutal (ten years of Iraqis dying of disease and famine)? I know I'm preaching to the choir, but good God why are we (the American public in general namely) such an ignorant and arrogant group of bastards?
I don't buy the cultural imperialism argument (flooding countries around the world with Nike and Starbucks ads) as warranting such discontent. Hell, it's not like it's OUR culture either, Nike and Starbucks were thrust upon us just as they are/were other cultures.
Now political imperialism is another story. But it seems more distorted than the old Cold War mantra of "spreading freedom and democracy." Americans bleed oil. If we want to keep driving big cars and paying $1+ for gas then we better hope to God the the people of Saudi Arabia, etc. don't get a democracy. For decades the ruling families/parties of the Middle East have neglected to share their oil wealth in ways that make the US look like Finland or Sweden. I am disappointed and saddened that the country I still love (what potential we have) would support and perpetuate oppressive regimes.
I hope this "bioterrorism" FUD doesn't materialize into anthing more than an unholy media ratings campaign. Yes, there are real dangers, but, there have always been those dangers. So please, turn off CNN Headline News, MSNBC, the Oreilly Factor, etc. Instead listen to NPR, read the BBC and ArabNews (www.arabnews.com), and watch CSPAN. And please don't be charmed by the devilishly enigmatic Rumsfeld. (yeah its foxnews but its funny)
As citizens of (a) free society(ies) we are free to choose to be as apathetic as we wish, but we are still bound by the nature of our government. When everyone has a voice if you abstain from expressing yourself you choose to defer your decision to someone else (namely the collective of those that do voice themselves). It's idealistic yes, but if we (again US people) hold our Constitution as ideal, then ideally we have no one to blame but ourselves.
done
sig
it wouldn't. note that a good deal of the trouble in Afghanistan is due to the constant fighting between different 'ethnic' groups. people will always find a reason to find a "them" to contrast their own "us".
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
I've added that to my file of biowar links.
Best Slashdot Co
Time to start milking cows again. At least cyberporn gave us lots of practice.
It is far more important that we, as the only superpower in the world, work NOT on additional countermeasures to combat terrorism and biological attacks, but on making such attacks irrelevant.
You're absolutely right in pointing to our hopeless foreign policy as the instigator of this entire ordeal.
If our military forces are used only in accordance with their constitutionally aligned duties, this paradigm would not exist, and terrorist attacks would be a non-issue.
Even if it ain't perfect, the immunity from our childhood smallpox innoculations is much better than nothing. And that's what you punk kids have - nothing!
I'm LOL, s'kiddies and haX0rs, imagining a world purged of wet-behind-the-ears twenty-somethings who think they invented IT and who imagine they actually know everything there is to know about computing when they haven't even begun to learn.
Hey, maybe there's a God after all.
Devastating weapons
Fanatical followers
Leaders bent on pure society, world domination
Using science and technology to support their own ends, even where use would appear to conflict with their beliefs.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I can't imagine I'd really have all that much to live for after a nuclear attack. I mean, surviving the actual attack is one thing. Those who die are the lucky ones. Succumbing to radiation sickness would suck beyond wildest measure. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't stick around for the smallpox.
We keep the stocks for research into the disease. I think there's an effort underway to sequence the genetic code. Hopefully the research will lead to a safer vaccine than the one we have now. It's based on cow pus.
Best Slashdot Co
It's not the small pox I am worried about. It's the BIG pox.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
This guy is not a troll, and he does have a point (about the dolphins)... I think that if everybody were to convert to Islam (or any other religeon for that matter) people would jsut fight between sects and over minor differences. Human beings are quarrelsome, territorial, disagreeable animals and we need a reason to feel superior and we've proven over time that if we have no real reason to fight, we will anyway. If we have paradise, we'll find a way to fuck it up (and no I don't believe in the garden of eden and all that stuff, but it is a good fable, and it does illustrate my point pretty well).
As for intelligent (and even unitelligent) animals, they will be glad to see us go. Even if we nuke everything into a radioactive smoking pile of rubble i doubt we could completely eradicate the volcanic vent bacteria, nor blue green algae, or a bunch of other little seeds of life. When people talk about saving the environment/saving the planet/ etc... what they really mean is "save ourselves" (which is a fine message i guess), but we're playing with our own destruction, the planet will go on without us, and as resilliant as we may be, we're not the most resilliant species out there. Whatever, fuck-it, i'm gonna go eat lunch.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
You're an idiot.
I wonder how many people will catch that reference. Somehow, I doubt anyone with mod points will. Insightful and funny.
Best Slashdot Co
that we care more about disease the MAY be released to kill thousands than AIDS which kills MILLIONS...
priorities?
sig
I remember when I had the big pox as a kid. Nasty week it was.
Anyway, the cure is to have as much intercourse as possible with members of the opposite sex.
is the remapping of the apostrophe key to the out-of-range ascii character #146, combined with the introduction of an apostrophe bitmap for character #146, so as to mask the virus's presence on the local computer.
Then is the sudden urge to send a large text to a large media outlet, which will unarguably contain multiple "infected" ascii characters.
Next is the slashdot filter, which let the unholy characters pass through, because it is not up to date with the latest virus definitions.
Finally is the arrival of the corrupted apostrophe on your computer, visible or not, depending on whether you are already infected with the disease or not.
I would strongly suggest looking up the book of _A Higher Form of Killing_ (iirc, by Harris and Paxman). It's a sobering book. I found it in our high school library in Los Alamos. I'd be curious to see if it is still there...
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
I'm an old bastard based on typical /. readership and I've have shots to protect me aginst this silly small pox crud. I don't see a problem, why should you or did someone else forget about you too?
We can spend BILLIONS of dollars in anticipation of a POSSIBLE smallpox attack, or spend those exact same billions of dollars on a project GUARANTEED to save millions of lives.
The HIV epidemic in Africa is putting whole territories in danger of having an average age under 20 as often more than 60% of adults are HIV positive. The US and UK based drug companies and governments aren't doing anything about this - they have the drugs to slow the spread of HIV right now - they choose not to use them.
Spending this money on treating HIV in Africa will prevent many millions of infections over the next 10, 20 and hundred years. That is no exageration - just type HIV, Africa, Epidemic, Statistics into Google and see what you get!
I vote for the safe bet. Smallpox won't happen - it MIGHT, but HIV already IS. Do you splint the fat guys broken leg or lecture him about his diet?
Sorry for getting political - but this does 'matter'
Another deadly disease is ePox, which came about during the internet revolution of the 90's. Why is nobody talking about ePox?
I have Smallpox.
...
Well, it wasn't wiped out in MY house!
—Homer Simpson
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Why use a virus to retaliate? Using a virus would just mean infected people fleeing south into South Korea or north to China or Russia infecting those countries. The US likely wouldn't even use nuclear weapons to response they would use the army.
So we wan't to catch the big pox.
Best Slashdot Co
here is a modern difference.
Give me a few hundred thousand dollars, access to a research lab (any good universitylab woudl do) and w willingnes to die if I fucked up, and I'm reasonably certain that I could *make* smallpox from scratch.
This hasnt been talked about, and its brand new with modern technology, but its true.
One no longer needs acess to an existing strain of the fivus. Just whip it up yourself.
And no, I wont tell how I would do it.
on Anthrax over here. It's well-written, concise, and debunks a lot of the current Anthrax hype in a very sensible way.
Not terribly on-topic, but definitely related.
Personal me, collaborative you
People are afraid of biological warfare, but they forget one important thing about it. Although terrorists or resistance fighters rarely are afraid to die for their causes, they usually don't want to bring large-scale destruction to those they seek to defend. So contagious diseases are NOT good agents of bioterror for most purposes.
Smallpox is not the threat-- it is well-guarded, so it is beyond the means of the lone lunatic. The more organized people like bin Laden's group are unlikely to use it.
There is a larger threat though-- a lone lunatic COULD theoretically spread ebola, though. This is a much more scary scenario.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I agreea bout the uncontrollability of smallpox.
but, ebola would not, IMHO, be an efective weapon. Ebola outbreaks seem to be self-limiting. Transmissionrequires contact. In the areas of africa where ebola has spread, it is spread in large part by burial practices that bring familymembers into contact with infected fluids of the people being buried, and to the people caring for the dying. Limit this and the outbreak just goes away.
Smalpox aalso isnt as secure as people think. For one thig, inthis modern bio-world, one no longer needs access to the virus... one could just make it.
I know, I know.. but I'm reasonably sure that I could, for a relatively small output of money and time.. and no, I wont say how I would do it, but any virologist, or even anyone reasonably good with the skills of mol biol, could probably work out a scenario.
We?ve been overrun by windows users using ? instead of ' for an apostrophe. What a catastrophe.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
I'm in a weird situation here, a friend of mine works for a .gov agency that could be a potential target of terrorist. This friend recently had me capture a video for use on the internal network. I still got a copy on my hard drive, I don't want to release it because I know how traceable anything on the net is.
.mil dudes. The whole tape is about what threats are known to the goverment, what is on our soil now. Does .gov admitting they know of 5 suitcase sized nukes interest anyone? I got this video 2 weeks ago BTW. I feel torn between knowing the .gov want's to keep these things secret, the poor people that don't know, and the fact I could get really really busted for releasing this video. Worse is my friend could lose thier job. Anyways, here is a rundown of what the .gov said.
The video features a doctor, and a couple of
5 suitcase sized nukes.
Mustard Gas
Smallpox on our money.
Anthrax in the mail
It's kinda nasty cause it shows what people look like when they've been infected by these bio threats. I hope I stayed on topic here.
Doesn't it only have RNA, not DNA. Oh well, just me nitpicking, and I could be wrong. Been a while since I was in a biology class. Just out of curiousity could someone who actually has some working knowlege on the subject eductate me?
Seeing words like 'sobering' and 'terrifying' applied to terrorist biowarfare seems a bit over the top to me. We stand a greater chance of dying in a car accident or any of a wide range of more mundane lethal incidents then we do of getting smallpox, anthrax, or getting a plane flown into our office building. Yet, people arent submitting hand-wringing posts about these incidents that have a much greater chance of killing us.
Looks like novelty is the issue here, (Look! heres a ~new~ way we can die!) not potential lethality.
Given the large amount of research (and money) spent studying the "Gulf War" syndrome in the last ten years, without any conclusion, it's not sensible to blame any single factor.
But if I had to find a culprit, I would blame stress. Some people are more sensitive to stress than others. When hundreds of thousands of people are subject to such conditions, statistically there will be some extreme reactions. Soldiers coming home from wars always have some strange symptoms. They called it "shell shock" in World War I, for instance.
The only reason why people keep blaming anthrax vaccines, or "agent orange" as they did after Vietnam, is that there is a liability issue if the cause is found to be a manufactured product. Lawyers could not profit if the cause was found to be stress, since war is supposed to be stressful. At most, the veterans would get psychiatric treatment from the government, instead of "compensation" from a manufacturer.
what really scares the bejeezus outta me is modified smallpox.
to summarize the article, some guys in australia discovered by genetically modifying mousepox (pretty weak, like chicken pox) that they could turn it into a far, far deadlier virus which was pretty much immune to vaccines (!).
now, this kind of genetic modification isn't easy. but a vaccine-resistant strain of smallpox which kills somewhere up to 90% or so of people infected would really suck.
then again, maybe such a modification wouldn't work on smallpox like it does for mousepox. i hope.
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
You have to have the virus in order to study and most likely even create the vaccine. (The original live smallpox vaccine is proof). So destroying all that remains has greater potential impact in the long run as we would have to wait for an outbreak to actually start developing a vaccine.
Fundamentalist Islam and Fundamentalist Christianity both have conversion as a centerpiece of their religion. Most people who grow up in a christian household (including most people who are reading this) assume that *all* religions are like that, but there not. Just about all the others don't require you to be in their religion to make it to Heaven, for example.
Fundamentalist Islam requires that no piece of land ever revert from Islamic rule to non-Islamic rule. That's why Israel was so hated by much of the Arab world even from the Balfour Declaration in 1917--50 years before West Bank settlements. That's why Arafat couldn't agree to a peace plan with Barak in 2000-- agreeing to stop trying to eliminate the Jewish State would have been a death-sentence for him. That's why Osama Bin Laden talked about the "tragedy of Andalusia."-- Spain was under Islamic control a thousand years ago and he wants it back, dangnabbit! That's why American Troops in Saudi Arabia are so problematic.
Fundamentalist Christianity is not quite so land-centered, but until Vatican II in 1963, every Catholic was taught that non-Catholics were headed to Hell. Period. Again, part of that mandate to convert everyone. And since, as Elaine Bennes said, Hell is 'The Worst!', just about anything done to prevent someone from going to Hell was looked at as a good deed. Hence the Inquisition, Crusades, and those annoying knocks on your doors where people offer to give you their testament.
I realize this is off-topic, but I hate when people just toss out statements.
Sept. 11 may make the frightening reality of a terrorist attack more obvious
but it doesn't make a smallpox attack more likely. The motivation
for terrorism was there before Sept. 11 and I am sure it's still there.
It would seem the mind behind the Sept. 11 attack did not fear retribution, did not
consider human lives in themselves of value, had no problem with self
sacrifices. Perhaps we should count ourselves lucky that the attack was not
smallpox virus strategically distributed.
If anything I believe Sept. 11 makes a smallpox attack less likely. It shows the
terrorist's weapon of choice and it's not biological.
Sattinger's Law: It works better if you plug it in.
It's definately not suprising that this book is selling like hotcakes. In fact, this stupid "war" has been turning all sorts of profits here at home. American flags, t-shirts with with dumb slogans in red-white-blue, all sorts of singers vyeing for "anthem of the tragedy/conflict", and whatever else there is to give people some false sense of security through mindless nationalism. And as always, "2% of the profits will be donated to NYC because we're charitable people who care and all that bullshit." Of course, as this book shows, the money isn't only in t-shirts of osama bin laden with crosshairs over his head; theres also plenty of money to be made in getting information on terrorism, any information, to a paranoid public who will eat it up like candy. I've seen so many info-mags and other shitty looking paperbacks made up as legitimate "investigations into terror" and tossed up on the shelves as quickly as some crackpot ex-weekley world news writer can come up with them.
However, from what I gathered from the review, I'd say that this book sounds, to a greater or lesser degree, different. Obviously a lot of time and work went into it. It's not just some hyped up piece of trash meant to satiate some helpless, paranoid desire for more information since it was being written well before the attacks. The history of smallpox is interesting and revealing as it, among other things, demystifies a lot of naive beliefs about the colonization of america by europeans. Having not read the book, and not being familliar with the author, I can only hope that it's honest and realistic. I would definately assume, however, that a piece of non-fiction or a documentary from a more reliable source would be a much better place to look if you want real information. In other words, maybe people should check out some of the suggestions in earlier comments before buying this book!
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
How does one come to realize that one is allergic to the small pox vaccine?
-E
This was the case with the Anthrax, which I believe has been identified as an artificial strain, traced to a US Govt. laboratory.
We also create a motive. Fear. There are many who fear the US, who believe that it is an ego-centric culture, which will crush any other culture it encounters, given time. (Honestly, I've not seen much evidence to the contrary.) The assumption that American culture is "superior" to all others does piss off a lot of people, all over the world.
(The current President's view that International Law and International Treaties are only valid if convenient, and disposable otherwise, has sparked off two International incidents and is likely to fuel further crises, as the EU takes on Microsoft, the Kyoto Accords are implemented in other countries, and Germany takes the US to court.)
In short, our very protectionistic, defensive attitude is our own worst enemy. Smallpox, Ebola, Genetically Modified insects or plants that replace native life with stuff deadly to humans... All this and more is possible, today.
And what reason, exactly, are we giving other nations, other societies, to NOT use such weapons? It seems to me that we're not only giving others plenty of reasons, we're also determined to give them the means, too. Most other countries abandoned such warfare as too random, too unpredictable, and too slow, to be of any military value, and gave up such work.
In the US, we're keeping stockpiles of deadly organisms, and are conducting GM research which would be considered unethical anywhere else in the world. We don't protect the environment (which makes it hard to detect intrusions when they can still be dealt with), and we ensure that health coverage of any quality goes to the well-off. (Who probably need it a lot less, than those who aren't!)
In short, then, we're practically giving away weapons that can be used against us, giving others reasons to use those weapons, and we're then making it impossible for us to genuinely do anything that might protect us, by pricing it out of existance.
IMHO, there is only one solution to this, and a lot of pro-Corporate people are not going to like, or understand, it. We have to take care of what we have - people, fauna, flora, habitats, EVERYTHING - as well as, or better than, ourselves.
THEN, we can detect the threats long before they even become threatening. We would be more likely to have the means to deal with it, because we would catch the problem sooner. The same way that cancer is a whole lot easier to treat, when it's starting, than when it has completely run rampant.
Further, if we learn to be more aware of our surroundings, we're much less likely to incite the kind of fanatical hatred that we have seen. Directly, or indirectly. Our fear incites the fear of others. Our awareness might, then, incite awareness in others, which might even reduce global suspicion and hostility.
Sounds utopian? Probably. Nobody said I was a realist. I am merely a software engineer, who knows that Output = fn(Input), that if you want to change the output, you must change the input, and that if you keep getting outputs you don't like, then don't keep changing the input the same way.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Assuming a leak couldn't occur from the CDC stock does seem reasonable. Assuming a leak couldn't occur from the former Soviet lab is not reasonable.
Re: We can deal with it
Not now we can't. There are 20M smallpox vaccine doses in the US now, all of which are of uncertain quality (could easily be as few as 5M still good). It's been estimated by CDC that it might be possible to use diluted vaccine to get 2x-3x but dilution has never been tried. The CDC/HHS estimate that we could have 70M doses in 3-4 months. There are 280M people in the US.
The lethality of smallpox historically is ~30% (which puts an upper bound of 84M US people if everyone is infected) in population with some natural genetic immunity. There are forms of small pox and populations without natural genetic immunity (native American peoples 200-400 years ago) which can have 90+% lethality. Since vaccination ceased in the US prior to 1978, most of the population doesn't artificial immunity so best case the 30% number applied but it could be higher. The main factor controlling the actual number is the nature of the propagation: traditional epidemics are diffusive while terrorist can make them non-diffusive.
Putting the 84M in perspective compare this to US war deaths:
Revolutionary War: 4,435
Civil War (North & South): 498,332
WWI: 116,708
Total (all nations) WWI deaths from combat: ~10M
Total deaths from Spanish Flu in 1918-1919: 21M (600,000 civilian+military US deaths, military US ~200,000 deaths - yes, more US soldiers died in WWI from flu than bullets! And 2x died from bullets in WWI than in Vietnam!)
WWII: 407,316
Vietnam: 58,168
Re: We can only hope...
So maybe we'll have enough vaccine within a year, BUT, the death rate due to lethal vaccine side effects (source: CDC) is about 1:1,000,000, or 280 deaths from vaccination, and 1:10,000 rate of moderate to severe side effects or 28,000 (bad enough to require hospitalization).
This is the method that has been used in the control of endemic contagious disease for decades. A disease investigation begins when an individual is identified as having a communicable disease. An investigator interviews the patient, family members, physicians, nurses, and anyone else who may have knowledge of the primary patient's contacts, anyone who might have been exposed, and anyone who might have been the source of the disease. Then the contacts are screened to see if they have or have ever had the disease. The type of contact screened depends on the nature of the disease. A sexually transmitted disease will require interviewing only infected patients and screening only their sex partners. A disease that is spread by respiratory contact, such as tuberculosis, may require screening tens to hundreds of persons, such as other inmates in a prison.
Support Texas Troops use TXGoogle
I don't think we'd be keeping it as a method of deterence against any country. Merely, as another poster pointed out, a tool for research.
Besides, IIRC, we've been VERY vocal that we'd retaliate against any use of Weapons of Mass Destruction (nukes, chem or bio weapons) with nukes. It has been doctrine since the Gulf War, again, iirc.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Man, major brain cramp.
Best Slashdot Co
Only the truly jigoist, naive, or stupid would believe the US is not guilty of similar development.
yes...addiction to playing Zerg in Starcraft is an illness that can spread rampantly.
It will consume and devour your body, mind, and social life.
Scourge are a zerglings greatest defense against air attack...
*braces for flame*
Perhaps NY should invest in some...
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
Smallpox was a terrible epidemic here in the states when it wqs used as a biological agent against the aboriginal populations in this country.
The Conneticut Indians saw Smallpox decimate 90% of their population. The effect of Smallpox on New England was more drastic than a Nuclear Weapon.
In a nuclear attack, you would lose 70-75% of the populated area, Smallpox killed at least 80% of the Native American population living in New England.
The vistory over smallpox came about because we used it against our old enemies and now our new ones are using it against us.
Jason Maggard
Proud to be Miami
Nothing4sale.org
Who cares about small pox when there's a virus out there that can turn you into a really pissed off monkey!?
Its terrifying enough that the terrorists have got Anthrax and Sarin, without them having smallpox as well.
:)
Call it my ignorance, but isn't Sarin a fictitious Command & Conquer thing?
cheers,
BM
The US has no need to retaliate with a bioweapon. A few 500 kiloton warheads launched by the nice folks in silos/submarines will do a wonderful job of eliminating the islamic fundamentalist wacko problem.
The US just needs to make it *very* clear that that's what will happen if they try a serious bio-attack and then follow through if it happens. Deterrence works; even suicide bombers care about their own families.
(http://www.lp.org/):
One of the most obvious points made by this sorry tale is that governments really are not the best institutions to control the market for biological weapons and viri in general. The development of smallpox, in particular the more dangerous strains, has been done with taxpayers money, by the usual bunch of incompetant government employees that have brought us such successes as the war on drugs, and profitable railway services.
It was inevitable that with the collapse of the former soviet union, viri that was under control of the ruling regime would fall into the hands of outsiders, as bribes and the black market took the place of excessive government regulation because of underpaid, underqualified, overworked employees that are an inevitable effect of socialism.
How things would have been different if the market had been allowed to control and distribute dangerous contageous diseases. A company collapsing would have made no difference, as successful competitors would have snapped up its physical and intellectual property in a moment. With the effect of leaks and corruption representing very real threats to an employer's profitability, a private company would ensure the employees with control over the viri are well paid and well taken care of. In short, the collapse of the soviet union would have made no difference, as private industry would have kept control over the viri and carried on throughout the hardships as business as usual.
The best thing the US government can do to keep Americans safe is to privatise the chemical and biological weapons labs, and destroy the unnatural monopoly it has over these areas. Natural monopolies may appear in their places, but those would be stable companies, almost by definition, free from the whims of poor economic conditions and safe in the embrace of the market.
I can see the headlines now:
D.C. -- The United States earlier today wiped Afghanistan off the map!
With Airplanes dumping powder on people's houses the proof is there that they don't need smallpox or Anthrax. Many pesticides and other common poisons could be easily as deadly.
What's worse is that this shit is going on and the media isn't noticing. Mostly to prevent panic, I'm sure, but it's pretty bad when someone lives less than 5 miles where something like this happens, and NO INFORMATION IS AVAILABLE!
If Small Pox were to break out -- unless it gets into the public eye before big-brother can step in -- don't worry, you won't ever know about it.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Nope. It's real. It's a nerve gas, developed by the Germans in the early 20th century, IIRC. It was used by a fanatical Japanese cult to gas a subway in Tokyo a few years ago. Killed approx. a dozen people, made another thousand or so quite ill. Some have never fully recovered. Its attraction is that it's relatively easy to manufacture.
A witty saying is worth nothing - Voltaire
"-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity."
I'm certainly not going to pay money to join a snobbish organization full of people who can't even spell "tolerance" correctly.
But you did. Sucker!
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
a very good read from a credable source
http://cryptome.org/smallpox-wmd.htm
Extreme fundamentalist groups have historically either been cults or the proxy soldiers of Machiavellian guerilla leaders. Their relationship to the tenets of whatever religion they claim to represent is tenuous at best, in nearly every instance.
Regardless, the primary mechanism for carrying out the most horrific crimes by sane, ostensibly well-adjusted people has historically been a shift in belief to portray what they're planning as "right" and "just". And if there's another refuge for wrongheadedness quite as expansive as religion (can't prove it right or wrong -- when's the last time God bought you a drink?), I haven't ever seen it. The Nazis used the next-best excuse, the "good of humanity". Regardless, if you can't see what I'm getting at here, you're in denial.
Whether I'm a bigot and/or an asshole remains the subject of some debate amongst my peers, but I wanted to clarify this point.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
Maybe I'm getting old...
Perhaps a journalist could help me understand the subtle difference between reporting an Anthrax Scare and reporting Anthrax Deaths. I'm under the impression that it would be improper to say scare if deaths had occured.
Just trying to keep the disinfo to a minimum.
The world was set to destroy all remaining traces of this plague in the 90's, the US backed out, said something osbcure about the ethics of wiping out species as an excuse, and kept this terrible thing in store in case it might be usefull some day.
The soviets, not being idiots, deciding to keep it too, not to be left behind.
We could be safe, the US choose to keep the damocles sword in place.
Damn them.
Buying more nerf toys at toys'r'us (at least one major company still has dotcom fun) I saw a poster in the window for "POX". No mention of what it was but it did seem kind of badly timed.
It was/is a very serious disease, and has confusing symptoms in many body systems. IIRC Dr Lister said: "he who knows the Great Pox knows medecine."
The smallpox virus has been fully sequenced.
Thre ws a debate a coupel years back; the original plan had been for both the soviets and os to destroyour stocks once we had the complete sequence. However, even after we sequenced it, we and they decided not to destroy the stoclks, becaue of their value as research tools and because we might need them quickly to produe vaccine.
As a research tool, smallpox could be very, very useful in deciphering virulence eterminants. smallpox is very closely related to chickenpox, with only slight differences., but the virulence of the two is quite diferent. Understanding how the genetic diferences lead tothe virulence differences could be quite useful in beginning to understand the virulence of other virii.
By the way, the reson we wanted to sequence the virus first, before destroying, is because we were aware that given a sequence, we could always recreate the virus. The sequence has been published. And we *can* recreate the virus. Most easily, one could start with chicken pox, synthesize the appropriate viral sequences and repace them in, and turn chickenpos into smallpox.
This is what scares the shit out of me... one could *make* smallpox, without ever having to find a source for the virus. Virologist modify the sequence of viruses all the time, for research purposes,in labs with a few hundred thousand dollars of basic equipment.
Oh, my, a member of MENSA, don't like stupidity, and you spell "tolerance" incorrectly in your .sig line?
None too bright, that.
Virg
accident san dsuch have a very high probability (~1) of killing a few of us every day.
An outbreakof a disease like smallpox has a much lower probability of happening on any given day,but if it does, the consequences are much greter. That is why the issue is much more than 'novelty.'
Anybody ever read Hotzone? The airborn version of ebola (Hemmoraghic fever) that was discovered in a washington suburb a decade ago LUCKILY only infected monkeys. Normally ebola infects both humans and monkeys, but luckily is only transmissible via contact with bodily fluids. An airborn version was discovered and since this disease is 90% fatal, if a strain is found that can infect humans and has the structure to live in aerosol form, would be FAR FAR worse then smallpox. Most people have no idea how close we came to global oblivion of over 90% of the human race during that infection at the monkey quarantine house. Scary stuff. Stephen King wrote that Hotzone was the scariest book he had ever read. Its terrifying. And all it would take is one guy to walk into an international airport with an airborn version of the virus. 36 hours later the world is in deep doo doo.
The 'airborn' version of ebola that he talked about in Hot Zone was never shown definitively to be airborn. The *only* evidence is that it spread between cages (and rooms if I remember correctly). Could have been a feeding or cleaning or caretaker handling problem of some kind as well.
I agree that an airborn hemoraghic fever virus would be bad news. But there is no evidence that ebola, or marburg, or any of the other related nasties in humans has been transmited this way.
BTW, the Hot Zone was a very alarmist book, written by a guy who didnt really understand what he was talking about. I am scared about a lot of this shit, but that book isnt a good place to learn why we shold be scared, and what we should be scared about.
Slashdot has caught the dreaded ?question mark? disease. The poster must?ve cutted and pasted from dodgy html editor into the text box.
Please identify for us the Christian equivalent of Islamic Jihad, DFLP, and Al Qaida.
Please identify the Israeli equivalents.
Note: don't go scrambling for your history book, bubba; we are dealing with current fundamentalist groups.
It is a popular lie that various fundamentalist groups are indistinguishable from one another. They are only indistinguishable to secularists who, like the racists who claim "you can't tell one <insert ethnic minority here> from another", are ignorant bigots.
Irony? Or extremely long term planning? (If not by him, then by the government that employed him)
After all, without Zhdanov's earlier work eliminating the need for mass vaccination, his work developing ICBM-delivered smallpox would have been futile.
Goodness! You don't have very much imagination, or you don't have very much appreciation for history.
The French Revolution was born out of intense antipathy for religion, and became a bloodbath.
Stalin butchered millions, and it wasn't in the name of God; Mao slaughtered something like 50 million in the Cultural Revolution.
Atheism has quite a colored history, my friend. Wake up and smell the atrocities.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
It seems the readership (or mods) doesn't realise that biological warfare (specifically small pox) has been used for ages.
1) By Genghis Khan while sieging cities
2) By Spanish conquistadors attacking Incans and Aztecs
3) By English & American soldiers against American-Indian tribes. (Check out pbs for detailed transcripts of battles and methods used)
Claims like only others (the villains, islamic fundies, soviets) have done it and will do it are preposterous.
Strangely, I find no mention of these strategic uses in the review. It leads me to wonder whether the book mentions them.
Mirror, Mirror on the wall who is the biggest hypocrite of them all?
My 0.02$
I think you're full of crap, about the video at least. If you really wanted to release it anonymously just rent computer time at a Kinko's, and pay with cash. What a knucklehead. OK, proove me wrong, stop talking about it and DO it!
You've said it yourself: CHRISTIAN killers, not jewish.
and in a land torn by a bloddy civil war, where every step could be your end, mistakes in judgement are a common thing.
The CAHAN inquery commity (which gave the recomendations about Sharon.) NEVER hinted this was an israelly crime of war, only that it was done under our ADMINISTRATIVE responsibility. i.e. once we conquered the area, we are responsible. You may not know, conquering and controlling are completely different things; there are many examples of actions done under a so-called "conquered" teritory which the conquerer did not approve of.
this is not a great chapter of israelly history, but , somehow, it is allways being highlighted as opposed to much "smaller-scale" events , the holocaust, say, or the armenien holocaust (where MUSLIM turks did a genocide on the armenians)
the fact you mention only a small-scale, controversial event from one side and fail to compare it to large-scale intentional ones from others is a great example of double standards.
Working for necessity's mother.