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Mutant Flu Researchers Declare a Time Out
New submitter scibri writes "Researchers working on highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza have said they will stop work on the virus for 60 days, to allow them to explain the importance of their work to politicians and the public. Quoting: 'Despite the positive public-health benefits these studies sought to provide, a perceived fear that the ferret-transmissible H5 HA viruses may escape from the laboratories has generated intense public debate in the media on the benefits and potential harm of this type of research. We would like to assure the public that these experiments have been conducted with appropriate regulatory oversight in secure containment facilities by highly trained and responsible personnel to minimize any risk of accidental release.'"
Reader Harperdog sends in a related article arguing that we shouldn't be having a debate about the censorship of research, but rather a debate over whether the research should have been allowed in the first place.
Are they researchers for the mutant flu or are they flu researchers that are mutants? Or did the mutant flu make them mutants?
And this is the way the new Dark Ages will begin. Not from where you'd expect, religious fundamentalists who are offended by the challenge reality presents to their mythology. But from easily-frightened handwringing "ethicists", who had they been around in the time of the caveman would have taken away Ugh's flint for fear he'd burn down the forest were he to succeed in starting a fire.
I'm going to dream about an old woman in a cornfield on a porch soon, aren't I?
I knew those ferrets where up to something. They must be stopped!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
If these guys don't do the research, someone else will. Probably some government, and then they'll spread it once they have a secret cure for themselves.
I think you have confused the government with drug companies. Granted the difference is sometimes difficult to discern.
A drug company is a private corporation over which you have no control.
A government is a public corporation that you vote for, and is controlled by the drug companies. (& etc.)
...have someone studying it now rather than having them start when its already too late. It can take months or years to create a vaccine, then more time to manufacture/distribute it to the public. By this time a large proportion of the world's population could be infected.
We would like to assure the public that these experiments have been conducted with appropriate regulatory oversight in secure containment facilities by highly trained and responsible personnel to minimize any risk of accidental release.
Why does this remind me of all the stories where some contractor walked out of a "secure $organization facility" with highly sensitive data/source code/credit_card numbers etc...?
Should we be surprised when we read a story one day that says that some Chinese researcher walked out the door with a container of some highly contagious strain of Ferret Flu...
What they are working on is a way to create a sustainable world with a far smaller population. You can't just line people up against the wall and shoot them or poison them as the Nazis did but a global epidemic accidentally released from a laboratory will serve just as well and with a far smaller number of people that need to be held accountable.
and that should give us time to find that Damn ferret.
I see. SOMEONE will do it .. so that makes is moral for ANYONE to do it when NOBODY should be doing it.
hmm....
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
And I admit I don't know the difference between level 3 and level 4 facilities
I'm a catastrophic movie lover and I can knowledgeably tell you that level 3 facilities only require you to have a face mask, glasses, gloves and being extra careful with your test tubes, whereas level 4 facilities involve a sci-fi-like separated building with an imposing airlock controlled by an handprint-operated electronic lock making cool noises, inside which scientists work in awesome-looking spacesuits!
Ezekiel 23:20
Newsflash: SOMEONE is already doing it on a scale so massive that human beings can't even come close to competing with. That someone is called The Universe, or more specifically in this case the Planet Earth.
Flu virii are replicating and recombining on their own. They do it all day every day in billions of organisms around the planet. By doing a tiny tiny tiny version of the same thing in a controlled manner in a lab, we can learn a whole lot about that natural process that will provide wonderful insights to help combat the really bad stuff that the evolution of these virii WILL produce at some point.
In all likelihood all of the combinations that these scientists come up with already exist somewhere.
Hello, Ron A. M. Fouchier and 38 co-authors here. I want to assure everyone that our work on a highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza will have no
er...
hold a moment...
we aren't feeling too well..
can someone please #$%^
NO CARRIER
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
It seems like both right and left want to stop research in science depending on RELIGIOUS POVs. The evangelicals, want to stop genetic research, deny evolution as well as Global Warming. The left, with their own brand of religion, want to stop nuclear research and now this.
it is hard to believe that America was at one time, the leading nation in science. Since the likes of reagan onwards, we have suffered over and over by both extremist on right and left wings.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The seven experiments of concern are those that would:
1. demonstrate how to make a vaccine ineffective
2. confer resistance to antibiotics or antiviral agents
3. enhance a pathogen's virulence or make a non-virulent microbe virulent
4. increase transmissibility of a pathogen
5. alter the host range of a pathogen
6. enable a pathogen's ability to evade diagnostic or detection modalities
7. enable the weaponization of a biological agent or toxin
.
I see your point, especially related to #7. However, I'd prefer to know that we understand pathogens, antibiotic actions, and immunization before we really, really need that knowledge. Bubonic Plague wiped out about 1/3 of Europe's population because they didn't have antibiotics.
I see no reason for an experimental virus to be both highly contagious and deadly at the same time. Couldn't you learn the same thing from two viruses. One that was very contagious but not dangerous and another that was very deadly but not contagious?
Why put the warhead in the missile if you don't intend to kill people? if you want to test the missile, put a dummy warhead in it. If you want to test the warhead, then detonate without the delivery mechanism.
Viral researchers do this sort of thing all the time. They test contagious viruses with harmless strains to watch how they get into the body. Deadly strains are typically injected. They're not airborne.
Maybe I don't understand what they're doing but the whole thing smells like a germ warfare lab if they're combining the two and trying to make them more deadly. That's a weaponization program.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Or we can just, you know, look it up
lol If that's even remotely true, then I definitely want any pandemic-capable viruses worked on in level 4 labs.
You inspired me to look it up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level
"Biosafety level 3 ... blah blah blah. Key words, "treatments exist."
This level is applicable to clinical, diagnostic, teaching, research, or production facilities in which work is done with indigenous or exotic agents which may cause serious or potentially lethal disease after inhalation.[7] It includes various bacteria, parasites and viruses that can cause severe to fatal disease in humans but for which treatments exist, such as"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H5N1
60% fatal, vaccine being developed. In other words, no treatments exist, and it's highly deadly.
Yeah, let's go with BSL4, please.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
No, the researchers are themselves a highly evolved mutation of the influenza virus.
Which mean that they can't produce offspring unless they infect you?
Whatever you do, don't click the link!
:-P
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Being able to defend against is before MILLION OF PEOPLE DIE. There is your benefit.
Also, developed the technology that makes vaccine and vaccine research better and faster.
""someone else will do it" seems to be a stupid argument to support doing it."
that's a good argument because if someone else weaponizes it, we won't have a reasonable response time.
"As for developing cures, the main workaround for most of these sorts of diseases is the same- quarantine. Because when "stuff happens" even if a potential cure/vaccine may exist, you usually have no way or resources to get enough of it to everyone in time."
you need to stop talking now. Not only aren't you qualified to have this discussion, you are ignorant of even the most basic principles.
Quarantine a flu epidemic.. idiot.
SO, where do we quarentine the first 100+thousand? million? Before we know it it is in the wild. Limiting travel is part of it, but you need to reliace a few things.
It's will be, at least 3 days before the first symptions . And it won't become known until many people ahve it ad go to a hospital that reports it to the CDC.
SO, at best, we are looking at a week. Best Case.
Some people get the flu and have it active and show little or no symptom.
If they got onto any public transportation? Now hoe may exposed? now who do you quarantine?
Quarantine people is really the weakest defense. Necessary, but weak.
If we know how to make the vaccines, we can ramp up very quickly. Like we did with the bird flu; which, BTW, had a 30+% mortality rate when first found, and almost every hospital in the NW was out of beds. Imagine if we had to have waited a month longer before getting the vaccine to people?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It seems to me that these researchers need adult supervision. Forgetting about 'terrorism' for the moment, the consequences of a small mistake or small misunderstanding are far too large. They appear to be thinking like little children playing with cap guns than like adults working with technologies that could possibly lead to either another human population bottleneck or, indeed, extinction.
...the really bad stuff that the evolution of these virii WILL produce at some point.
NOT. VIRII.
You sound like an idiot.
Indeed. The closest Latin word to virii would be viri, which is just the plural for vir, "a man". So I guess the GGP might be right -- "the evolution of these virii^Wmen" *has* produced some really bad stuff.
More pedantically though, assuming virii existed as the plural of some Latin word, the rules state that the singular would be virius -- still not virus, and not a word in any language that I'm aware of.
Going the other way from singular to plural and using basic Latin rules, many people might look at virus and assume you just change the -us to -i to make the plural, but that gives us viri again -- meaning "men" as the plural of "a man". Looking deeper, we find that the actual Latin word virus was uncountable , so it never even had a plural in Latin -- so applying Latin rules for deriving the plural is just silly.
Applying English rules for plural formation to the *countable* *English* word virus gives us the proper plural form viruses.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
It's still just a variation of the Flu. Some people will be resistant.
If you want a doomsday weapon you have to genetic engineer in some African sleeping sickness surface chemistry genes. That would really fuck over our immune systems.
I bet (hope) the new $150,000 gene sequencer machines are pre-hacked not to sequence those genes, just like printers would'nt copy currency. All they would need is a table of hash's in the machine. Every time the CDC finds a new very dangerous gene they add a hash with the next update.
Otherwise it's just a matter of time before some small group of lunatics cooks up something for Prof Farnsworth's collection.
Governments for all their faults seem to lack the insanity required to kill us all. Even the Indians/Pakis haven't nuked each other. A-bombs seem to force a level of sanity on otherwise fanatical people.
Perhaps its facing the A-bombs that does it. When it was only one, it was bombs away, don't fuck with us now. Granting 'don't fuck with us now' is a lot better then any historical precedent.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"We would like to assure the public that these experiments have been conducted with appropriate regulatory oversight in secure containment facilities by highly trained and responsible personnel to minimize any risk of accidental release."
Hmmm. You've not talked to customer service from Dell recently, I take it.
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)
Given a large enough number of viral mutations and a large enough timeframe, all events with non-zero statistical probability should be considered essentially certain to occur.
Regardless, though, of whether this specific pathogen would arise, we have the question of whether the development of it tells us anything new about how viruses work (specifically the flu virus) and what makes a virus deadly versus not deadly. The evidence so far is that it does tell us something about both. I consider that to be a very high reward, particularly as we now know there are a series of mutations required to make flu deadly, that none of the modern flu strains have the capacity to pull a Spanish Flu within the next year. By understanding more about what critical mutations are needed, we can get early warning. We will be able to see a deadly strain prior to it becoming deadly, allowing us many months - perhaps even a year or two - to develop suitable vaccines before the critical mutation ever arises.
We know from the Mexican Swine Flu case that our current pandemic controls just don't work. The disease was less lethal than feared, but that was luck not skill. Had it been deadly, none of the controls that existed were capable of identifying the disease in time, restricting its spread or handling the panic amongst health workers. The last of these was the worst problem as it was the Mexican paramedics and hospitals who were largely responsible for it becoming a pandemic. They were criminally negligent to the point where had it been another Spanish Flu, they would be guilty of planetary genocide. For that alone, I consider them no better than the criminal gangs there.
If we are to prevent a deadly pandemic, then, we have to bypass governments AND almost the entire healthcare industry. They aren't competent and they can't be trusted. Advance notice, predictive bio-engineering and vaccinations based on forecasts of likely deadly strains would seem to be the best hope for preventing a deadly pandemic at this time. We don't have anything else. Nothing.
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)
It is a risk/reward analysis; to me the risk of killing billions of people is much heavier on my scale of importance than any reward from the research.
The risk of research: Billions of people could die if containment fails or if natural strains evolve and spread before an effective vaccine is developed.
Reward of research: Eliminate risk of Billions of people dying if natural strains evolve and spread or containment fails.
Risk of NO research: Billions of people could die if natural strains evolve and spread.
Reward of NO research: eliminate risk of Billions of people dying from containment failure.
Which is better? There is no action that creates zero risk of Billions of people dying.
likewise, radioactive decay is happening everywhere on earth, so who cares if someone has a neutron bomb
pffffffffffft
of course in the vast scope of the universe human endeavour is paltry. but that doesn't mean a couple of smart humans can't get together and make a virus purposefully tailored to infect humans, and do that well, and do that tomorrow, rahter than mother nature arriving at the juncture in 20-2000 years
and some other asshole fucks up and releases it by mistake or some nutcase thinks its a good idea to repeat the experiment and release it because allah or god or yahweh said to
so i'll make you a deal: i won't posit mankind as omnipotent in the face of mother nature's power, if you don't pretend mankind has no abilities to royally screw himself. deal?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it