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Deadly H5N1 Flu Studies To Stay Secret... For Now
Edsj writes "A spokesman for the World Health Organization announced that an agreement had been reached, after a debate, to keep details secret of the controversial work about the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian flu virus until deeper risk analyses have been carried out. The scientists who made the study, led by Ron Fouchier, still want to release the full paper at some future date for public viewing, but for the time being, the NSABB got what it wanted."
The moratorium will be extended "probably for several months."
So which weapon has a higher long term mortality rate to the innocent? Land mines or biological warfare? Iran's research in nuclear weapons seems so passe at this point. As we approach 10 billion people on this blue marble, the chances that we'll cull our numbers by 20% or more using some novel new method seems to race towards 1 at a faster and faster rate.
moox. for a new generation.
All security is through obscurity. If somebody knows your key, or your hiding spot, or what time you have to put down your shotgun to take a crap, you're through. All cryptography does is let you protect a large secret with a smaller one.
The WHO is a UN agency, not a governmental one.
I maintain that the UN is a government.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Or perhaps they were looking for ways to prevent the global pandemic that has a pretty good potential of wiping out over half of humans on the planet? You know, like those who experimented on dozens of diseases that killed most people before they reached the age where they could procreate, eventually driving infectious disease mortality so far down, that most people don't understand the risks hiding in them?
Just a suggestion.
Well in the case of biology, pretty much.
You'd have to have some pretty damn good resources in order to be able to build H5N1, not only that, to be able to make the even worse version they supposedly created.
Since these guys likely had top gear to produce these results, it'd likely take a lot of trial and error for those with almost certainly lesser resources. (at least, we should hope they had top hardware for doing this research...)
When (if) we find out ways to protect against those strains in particular, it'd be less of a risk.
Not as much as you might think. As I pointed out previously, the Ferret is out of the bag. The big question was whether or not you could take H5N1 and pass it through a mammal and make mammal-mammal transmission reasonably efficient (as far as the virus is concerned). Since we know the answer is 'yes' and the bonus answer is 'ferret' then the techniques needed to reproduce (so to speak) the experiment is 1) a culture of H5N1 and the ability to keep it alive and 2) a cage full of ferrets and the ability to keep them alive. 1) isn't exactly trivial but it's not anything that a PhD level viral researcher couldn't manage on a budget easily obtainable by some random psychopath. 2) is trivial.
We're doomed (again).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I'd guess that a lot of that "6 months" involves testing. In other words, if there is a very quickly spreading pandemic that kills over half the people it infects, we could probably say "Let's just pray that there aren't too horrible side effects for most people. Start mass producing the prototype!"
Heh. But you're talking about vaccinating just about everybody on the planet, in a pandemic. Is your proposal that we inject the entire population of the world with an untested medicine, in hopes of preventing disease? I somehow don't think that suggestion would travel far within the WHO.
Also, there's no "prototype vaccine." They know how to make a vaccine that will be effective against any strain of flu, pretty much. They're all just variations of the same thing. The problem is that there are so many different variations (mutations) that they have to predict which one to manufacture in any given year, given the production capacity (labs/factories) available. And you can't just say "keep manufacturing H5N1 vaccine until we have enough for everybody," because it doesn't necessarily have a long shelf life. In fact, they're not really sure how long stockpiled doses would remain effective.
What's more, manufacturing the flu vaccine isn't like manufacturing paint or chairs. The raw materials of the flu vaccine involve living, biological things. The virus itself is alive and must be cultured (before they kill it), and to do that, they grow it inside fertilized chicken eggs -- and as we know, nine chickens don't help you produce a fertilized egg any faster than one does (and to get more chickens, you need more fertilized eggs). So when you estimate how many doses of flu vaccine can be manufactured in a given period of time, it's a little bit like estimating how many cheeseburgers McDonald's can make in the same period of time ... while it is possible to "just make more," it's not necessarily as easy as it sounds.
tl;dr -- When scientists talk about how many flu vaccine doses it would be possible to manufacture in a given period, they pretty much know what they're talking about.
Breakfast served all day!
Last I checked, there ISNT an "antidote" to the flu.