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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."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H5N1
On October 10, 2011 the WHO announced a total of 566 human cases which resulted in the deaths of 332 people since 2003
So it kills about 58% of the people it infects
Just wait until Anonymous (Achoo!) gets their hands on it (sniffle).
Have gnu, will travel.
Government Organization Declares Self Sole Proprietor of Bio-Terrorism
And as we all know, government officials never use such exclusivity of information for their own personal profit.
Nothing to worry about here, Citizen, now move along...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
As was brought up couple weeks back in SciFri, the study abstract and rough process which has been talked publicly is enough for skilled laboratory to try same. Passing the virus just trough five ferret infections to get it spreading over air is so simple and little that it might happen anyway naturally over time without human intervention.
All we can do and should do is start developing vaccines now and not wait until we would be too late. It takes about 6 months to develop and produce enough vaccine. Thinking that the lethality of H1N5 is about 50% compared to smallpox ~40% it's going to be enormous panic to get it done if any preparations were not done beforehand.
... that it is relatively easy to produce this deadly strain.
If it were hard, say like producing an atomic bomb (rather, producing the fuel for an atomic bomb)... then there would be no reason to keep it secret.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I submitted this a few hours before this one. (That makes three for three recent submissions of mine that were in the /recent queue and just vanished!). I guess for this one they didn't like my alarmist tone. Anyway, these guys say the studies will stay secret but the New York Times link I provided says they will be releasing the full details (after a delay).
Here is my submission:
wisebabo writes
"So they're going to release FULL details of how to make this? Time to whip up my bio-reactor!
Ok, so this easily transmissible human to human virus (as predicted by ferret models) *only* has a lethality of 50% but that should be enough to collapse civilization. At least it'll help cut down on global warming.
Still that doesn't compare with that (smallpox?) variant which had an almost 100% fatality rate. I remember the publication for that one was suppressed pretty fast. I guess they think this one isn't nearly as dangerous which i would agree with except for the fact that it is AIRBORNE TRANSMISSIBLE (it's based on the Flu!). Boy is sneezing going to be a real conversation killer!
Seems like we've solved the Fermi Paradox; once a species has figured out to make or modify self-replicating nano bots (like viruses), they'll inevitably make one that will in one way or another wipe them out.
Hey, let's see if we can get them to release this in time for 12/21/12!"
Link to Original Source
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.
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!
The only way this would be "security through obscurity," in the sense that cryptography experts typically use that piece of jargon, is if they trying to be obscure about the means of hiding the flu data, in addition to hiding the flu data itself. Hiding the flu data is just plain old secrecy.
Since we are talking about scientifically reproducible data, I guess you might be hinting at an analogy to the mathematics or source code behind a cryptographic system: it's foolish to assume that bad guys wouldn't be able to learn facts about H5N1 anyway, in the same way that you shouldn't assume that crackers won't know how your security software operates. But, in a pragmatic context, some temporary secrecy might work out to be a good if imperfect idea—I don't really know.
"This algorithm runs in constant time. Come on, 2,147,483,648 is a constant..."
Right. "Security by obscurity" refers to the assumption that something is secure because you haven't told anyone how to defeat the security. The weakness of this method is obvious: You might not be the only one who knows what you know. Someone might have stolen the method from you by looking over your shoulder, or they might have figured out how to do it on their own.
Cryptography can be security by obscurity. Good cryptography is not. Good cryptography is based on a published, public algorithm that anyone can read and know how to do. And once they learn the method, they get sad, because they realize that they can't run the algorithm to unlock your encryption. To do so they'd need to know not just how to do it, but also the to fill in variables X, Y, and Z ... and to do that they'd need some piece of information, or maybe a physical object, or what-have you, which they do not possess.
The information they want to steal is obscured, but that's not the point. The security method is not obscured. It's as plain as day -- plain enough that you have to admit you don't know how to break it.
Cryptography becomes security by obscurity when the creator of the algorithm tries to keep it secret, in the misguided belief that nobody will be able to come up with a method to circumvent it. They might get lucky; it's possible that nobody will ever figure out how to break the encryption. But that's why security by obscurity is frowned upon: You're gambling on the hope that you're smarter than everybody who has an interest in breaking your cryptography, plus everybody who will ever be born who wants to break it. That just doesn't sound like good odds.
So back to this flu virus thing. It's security by obscurity because the scientists haven't invented anything, really. They have developed a method to produce a virus having certain characteristics, which are only slight variations of characteristics that are known to exist in other viruses already. So by censoring this research, they are literally saying that as long as they don't tell anyone how they did it, we will be safe from the possibility that this virus will appear -- which is mind-boggling, when the whole purpose of their experiment was to prove that the novel virus could exist in nature even had they not developed their method. Almost by definition, there must be other ways to produce this virus, or other, similar viruses. Their "secret" is worth nothing.
Breakfast served all day!
The 58% figure is not the number of people who were exposed to the virus and died. It is not the number of people who have been exposed and successfully infected and died.
The 58% figure is the number of people who were SO sick that it warranted going to the hospital, and then died.
Serological surveys have shown that in the populations where H5N1 has been historically present there are an extensive number of people who have been infected, successfully mounted an immune response, and survived. And even that says nothing about the people who were exposed and did not get sick.
The 50-60% figure has been getting a ton of coverage in the press, and is total bullshit. As a reason to censor scientific research, it is total bullshit.
Security through obscurity? Again? Since it works so well, right?
Particularly in light of the fact that we already know the most important features of their method...
Step 1) Pick your favorite in-the-wild strain of H5N1.
Step 2) Pick an animal known to occasionally catch H5N1, which for the most part shares viral sensitivity with Humans. Such as a ferret or dog or pig.
Step 3) Force-infect your first specimen with your H5N1 sample. It doesn't need to get really sick, just wait long enough for the directly injected viruses to clear the body and suck out a sampling of those that managed to replicate in the host.
Steps 4-9) Use that new "strain" to infect your second specimen. Rinse wash repeat half a dozen times. By then, you probably have a problem with not killing your specimens.
Step 10) Profit! Congrats, you have a strain that will likely also infect humans. If not (or just for good measure), start from step #2 with a different animal that shares viral sensitivity with humans.
Seriously, not rocket science - Genetics, actually, in the form of plain ol' simple evolution. You artificially select for those mutations best able to infect your target, and you end up with a strain that can do exactly that with great efficiency. Censoring this paper truly means nothing more than sticking our collective fingers in our ears and going "nah-NAH-NAH-I-can't-hear-you!"
We can't carry out risk analysis everytime research needs to be published, even if it is (wrongly, I believe, in the current context) perceived as dangerous.
But it won't be every time. This is clearly a politicized issue on many levels:
- It feeds into discussions of "the War on Terror"
- It triggers people's fears about vaccines, modern medicine, and doctors
- It strays into conservatives' beliefs about government funding of science
- Because it's science, it fires up debates about universities, education, "ivory-tower academics," etc
- The UN is involved, and some people think the UN shouldn't exist (and therefore either the WHO has no right to object, or the research should never have been done, take your pick)
- There's a class warfare element (who will get the vaccine?) and in America, at least, that always evokes race (will we get it?)
- The race thing in America runs deep (they invented the flu to kill us)
- And so on
Breakfast served all day!