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US Preserves Smallpox For Defense
lee1 writes "The US is preserving the last remaining known strains of smallpox in case they are needed to develop bio-warfare 'countermeasures' and as a hedge against possible outbreaks in a population with no natural immunity. 451 specimens are stored in Atlanta at the Centers for Disease Control, and 120 strains at the Russian Vector laboratory in Siberia. Meanwhile, the government has contracted to pay almost $3 billion to procure 14 million smallpox vaccination doses."
... for science... ... you monster...
... on the "known" part. It seems like a fairly intelligent move to me. It is indeed a low probability scenario that someone will actually release smallpox as a biological weapon, but still the consequences of such an outlier would be devastating enough to warrant the adoption of such a policy.
right...
Don't see why this is news; it's not like the US is the only place with virus reserves. And, it'd be very difficult to develop a vaccine for a disease without samples to work with (unless we want to try and catch infected people and draw samples before they die, which would just increase the deaths).
Can't see how anyone besides the ultra-paranoid would see this as a problem, nukes pose a more significant and real threat than these stored samples...
"Our goal each year should be to increase the number of goals we set for ourselves!"
Didn't everybody know this 10 years ago?
Yes, and there's some international group that puts out a recommendation for keep / don't keep every ten years. The US and Russia both ignore the no keep recommendation and it generates a news article. Expect to hear about it again in 2021.
They're keeping the samples so they can use them to make vaccines if there is an outbreak.
over time, complacency will rot security, and over time, creative malintentioned individuals or organizations will exploit that. a smallpox outbreak would be like 10-100 9/11s or 10-100 fukushimas. destruction then seems preferable. you don't even need an actual smallpox virus to make a vaccine
but you are operating against human psychology: we aren't made to discard such power, even if the power is completely malicious
it may sound odd, but consider the lord of the rings, when humans had the chance to destroy the one ring, but chose to keep it instead. yes, its fiction, but all potent fiction is rooted in real human psychology, or such fiction wouldn't have any resonance or attraction to us in terms of storytelling ability. and with the lord of the rings we have valuable insight into how our own weaknesses and greed and lust for power hurt us in the long term
we won't destroy smallpox. and we will be hurt by that decision, many years from now
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Uh, from a terrorist digging up a victim of the outbreak, or some other nations bio-weapons lab synthesizing it, or from it developing again from cowpox? Just because these are the only *known* samples doesn't mean they are the only samples in existence.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The problem is not those with declared stocks. The problem is that someone who isn't declaring it has some stored. Theyd be much more likely to do something untoward with it. And, if they do, then how would destroying small known stocks be anything but symbolism?
We're really early in the game of understanding the genetic basis of disease virulence. It's hard to say what may be useful in the way of organisms to be used in that kind of research.
Some emergent virus that uses some of smallpox's tricks may show up and we'd regret not having it available to study to better understand the new one.
The odds of them using smallpox as a weapon are too low to risk vaccinating everyone. The vaccination program would harm far more people. I don't mean that in a crazy autism way, I mean from bad reactions to the vaccine. Every vaccine has a rate at which these occur and we can compare that to the risks Al Qaeda poses. Since Al Qaeda has so far in the last 50 years killed less people in the USA than farm animals and they show no sign of getting stronger we can probably forgo the vaccinations for now.
Do you know for a fact that there exists no other sources of smallpox in the world? Do you know that no country/organization other than the US/Russia has smallpox samples? Do you know that there are no remote, indigenous population that still carries smallpox? Smallpox has been eradicated from the developed world and most of the under-developed world, but no one can be sure it is completely gone.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Yes but there are groups who wants to remind us that the U.S.A. isn't the model good guy. For some reason it gives these groups a feeling of self importance that they point out these things, they may not be able to feed and cloth the poor, or help improve the environment, or make anyones lives better, but they can do their part by showing that the United States of America isn't the Good Guy but a country out for its own self interest.
This is Data that will surprise only the United State Citizens who are nationalist, and thus will not believe the data anyways. Or people who just Hate the U.S. and just add it to their list of problems. But for the normal person around the world it shouldn't be a surprise at all. Like Every Country in the world it is out for its own self interest, and doesn't want to be attacked and/or taken over by an other country, if there is a threat to that they will want any advantage necessary.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
...an outbreak that would start from where exactly? This logic seems a bit circular.
Not circular if you assume it'll be accidentally released by the other guys.
Also the general public naively thinks only two known storage means only two storage sites exist... How exactly do you know the French don't have one? Or some dude working on it in NYC in 1960 died in '61, and they're just now getting around to defrosting and replacing his research freezer? I've often wondered what happens if some dude who died on a glacier 1000 years ago gets defrosted, and someone downstream drinks the water... On a regular basis cemeteries are dug up and moved, and before a certain era they are stuffed full of plague victims, thats just how it is... And how long can a single SP virus be preserved? Nobody really knows, although some smart people have some good guesses...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
"...an outbreak that would start from where exactly?"
Maybe from here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2404051.stm
or here:
http://www.livescience.com/2403-climate-threat-thawing-tundra-releases-infected-corpses.html
or even here:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2003-12-26-smallpox-in-envelope_x.htm
Can we assume that the declared US and Russian stocks are the last viable samples anywhere on the planet..?
Smallpox can't live more then 48 hours on blankets.
That story is an often repeated myth but is virologically impossible.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
So the US and Russian Federation toast the stock they have. 5 years later the People's Republic of China or North Korea release a mutated weaponized smallpox that no one else has a vaccine for.
Does having a tiny bit of old smallpox in a vial somewhere give you a significant advantage in making large quantities of vaccine for new mutated smallpox?
According to TFS the US is ordering 14 million smallpox vaccine doses and I don't think they're relying on the current smallpox vials to make them. It seems to me that we could kill off smallpox but still be ready to produce vaccines if a new strain broke out.
Frankly, I think the odds and resulting damage of some nation hiding weaponized smallpox all these years and intentionally releasing it are overshadowed by the odds and damage of the US accidentally releasing or losing the stored vials. Autoclave the thing and call it a day.
Hanging on to a microorganism that can kill millions is about as evil as evil gets. To the autoclave they should all go. Every last one of them. And anyone who defends the existence of smallpox as a weapon should have his head examined.
The problem is that the disease still exists outside of labs. Some victims were far enough north that they were buried in permafrost regions. Note that this fact has been the inspiration for numerous movies and tv shows. Also note that those concerned about global warming are also concerned about smallpox.
"The search for variola viruses surviving even longer was pursued in 1991 near Novosibirsk, Russia (9). "Bioweapons experts" searched for the variola virus in 19th-century smallpox victims mummified in the permafrost above the Arctic Circle. In the event of unusual thawing and flooding, the concern was that these corpses might become exposed and release infectious virus into the environment. In the 19th century, this region of Russia (Sakha Republic) was "ravaged by smallpox strains of extraordinary lethality" (9). Isolating and comparing them with preserved modern strains might identify genes contributing to virulence. To date, no live variola viruses have been isolated from Sakha. But the threat now is that "a sophisticated terrorist team might go smallpox hunting on the permafrost" (9)"
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol11no05/04-0616.htm
There has even been discussions regarding investigations of crypts in Europe:
"In the absence of reliable survival data some experts have advised the routine vaccination of archaeologists who might handle well preserved corpses"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1008009/pdf/brjindmed00145-0079.pdf
http://gsn.nti.org/gsn/nw_20110516_8175.php
(I'm so advanced that I combined information from two sources to produce my summary.)
I had a history book in college that was ~6months old at the time, several revisions in and had numerous awards. It had a section dedicated entirely to talking about how the Europeans purposefully spread smallpox and wiped out entire villages. It was covered under a chapter like "The Beginning of Biological Warfare". My teacher with a PHD in history also talked about it as fact. Well, neither the book nor my teacher specifically said blankets were used, but they both said smallpox was spread and it devastated villages and was done on purpose many times.
I've had several other history books in school say the same thing.
How is this a myth? I thought it was common knowledge being that historians and history books proclaim it as fact.
Since the smallpox genome was decoded and published in 2006, it is impossible to rid the world of the threat of smallpox.
The Vaccinia virus used in smallpox vaccinations is 95% similar to smallpox (see http://www.nap.edu/html/variola_virus/ch1.html). This means that the base difference is 10,000 bases. This is only modestly more than the 7500 bases assembled to synthetically recreate polio, which was also accomplished in 2006. You can order custom gene sequences of 1000 base pairs today at a cost of $1.30 per base pair.
A gene assembly lab, a sample of Vaccinia and a hundred thousand dollars can recreate smallpox today.
There is no other option but continue smallpox research for defensive purposes.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age