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Details of the Second Controversial Mutant Bird Flu Study Finally Published
An anonymous reader writes "The second of the two controversial bird flu studies once considered too risky to publish in fears that they would trigger a potentially devastating global influenza epidemic was published Thursday. The study describes how scientists created H5N1 virus strains that could become capable of airborne transmission between mammals. Scientists said that the findings, which had been censored for half a year, could help them detect dangerous virus strains in nature."
"could help them detect dangerous virus strains in nature."
But since it's "woowoo scary" we bury this research in spite of the benefits.
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BMO
What we really meant to say is we created a dangerous strain and will release it in the wild. We were doing it for research purposes only of course so don't worry about any kind of accidental release.
Hey everyone we just made a virus that did not exist before!!!
It is so fantastic we are so smart and great! It will replicate faster than any virus and spread through mammals!
Don't worry nothing bad will happen we have this under control we through of everything!!!
Only one problem.... We can not make a cure for it.
Just hope they don't call it Captain Tripps
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
1. Errant Scientists
2. Determined terrorists
3 Ideological propagandists.
So this is what Doctor Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz has been working on then!
WTF? That makes no sense. How does publishing a PAPER somehow unleash the virus? The research and work has already been done. Censoring or publishing the paper does nothing to affect, one way or another, whether the virus will mutate in this fashion.
As for potential terrorism uses, there are plenty of other virulent diseases that can be weaponized, far easier, in crude labs.
Frankly, I'd be more afraid of terrorists creating some disease that acts slowly, while spreading rapidly, across a narrow genotype. Think of the damage a virus that shuts down your kidneys completely, followed by other organs... over a couple of years time, while spreading as an airborne pathogen. Our health systems would be overtaxed, productivity would drop, it would be an economic disaster for the targeted areas.
other terrorists to make this? IT IS TRIVIAL. In fact, it is CHEAP to do, esp. compared to all of their other ideas.
So, how do you do it? You get allies to work in chicken farms in Indonesia, China, Vietnam, etc. These are all the places in which H5N1 variants are active. Wait until the farm has it (and right now, about 5-10% of the farms get it EACH YEAR). Once a place has it, take samples from the various chickens and take it back to Pakistan. spin down the blood, removing the blood cells and then inject it into a person (oddly, better to inject it into a child or old person; Avian operates different than other virus). Once they have it, expose them to normal airborne human flu. IOW, you are turning a human into a viral incubator. At that time, take samples of the person to hold aside, while you have 10-15 humans (knowing AQ, probably women) wait on the incubator. Spend a lot of time with them for the next 5-10 days. If somebody becomes infected, draw a number of samples from them, while allowing them to infect several other ppl. If the first set of waitors die from the infection, then you very likely have an airborne avian flu.
At that time, keep the infections going for a bit, but ideally, add in swine flu. The spanish flu that stopped WWI, was apparently a combination of Avian, Swine, and Human flu. Regardless, the original mixture is enough, but if you go with several more levels, you can make it even more lethal.
At that time, draw blood over the course of a couple of days from current incubators, spin it down to remove blood cells, mix, and then break apart into 1MM vials. That is enough to turn any human that is injected with it into a typhoid mary. Send them into airports, sporting events, malls, etc. Do it during the early phase when it is shedding, but not showing much symptoms of morbidity. Upon the person showing too many signs, pull them in, allow them to die in a quiet apartment and then dispose. Repeat with new person.
So, why did I post this? To point out how trivial it is to create this. More importantly, to point out that AQ has some nice and easy means of doing this. The question is, what stops them? Their enmens (sp). These ppl will say no to this. At some point, as AQ gets to the end of losing their war, they will disregard and do this. At that time, I hope that we are ready. Otherwise, it is possible that the spanish flu will be nothing more than a sniffle compared to what this will do.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yet AQ cannot even get someone's underpants to explode correctly.
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BMO
That is actually a LOT harder. They are trying to teach ppl REMOTELYhow to manufacturer bombs from multiple household chemicals that require loads of works to get them pure enough. Then you have to build a detonator (actually, the easy part). You have to explain how to sneak it into the airport and handle the stuff CAREFULLY (best way is to have somebody else do all of these steps since detectors can pick up a number of chemicals on clothing/skin). Finally, you are taking a person that is NOT really ready to sacrifice their life (only 9/11 ppl were really ready to give it their all) and putting them on the plane and trying to get them to do this. The ones in the camps and the guys on 9/11 PRACTICED all of this for DAYS. The underwear bombers did not practice. They just HOPED to make it through it.
OTOH, with this approach, somebody can do the hard part IN PRIVATE. Nobody watching. Then they calm themselves, say their goodbyes, and 1-2 days later start walking around the malls. Go into bathrooms, sneeze on their hands and wipe it on handles all over. Be a hotel maid and wipe their snot all over remote controls and wash basins (next day do the mall). Go to bars/clubs for the next couple of nights and have a GOOD TIME(you have 72 virgins coming your way). No, this is so much easier and can hit hard and fast compared to what 9/11 did. By doing this during flu season, it will actually make it worse since so many fools will go to work sick. But by mixing it with more variants of other flus, they spread it faster.
Weird to think about it, but this was all from when I worked at CDC back in 1980 (soviet commies). We discussed it on other bugs, but this works even better than the bugs that we were discussing. The reason is that if you have say 20 ppl spread around the nation and another 20 around Europe and perhaps another 20 around other nations such as Russia and China, it will be 2 weeks before the medical teams realize that they have been hit.
Note that AQ has a widely distributed army (and yes, it IS an Army). Smart on their part. They can hide all over with us unable to hit them. And if they take out 100K or more in several weeks, then they will get 100K following them. Sad, but true.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
other terrorists to make this? IT IS TRIVIAL. In fact, it is CHEAP to do, esp. compared to all of their other ideas. So, how do you do it? You get allies to work in chicken farms in Indonesia, China, Vietnam, etc. These are all the places in which H5N1 variants are active. Wait until the farm has it (and right now, about 5-10% of the farms get it EACH YEAR). ...
Too much trouble: just grow thousands of swines and chicken together. If needed, throw in some human flu infected personnel.
The "worst" thing that can happen: everything is normal and you have a successful agricultural business.
6 months? Big deal. That's just the normal delay to get something published in a peer reviewed journal. For some journals it can take up to a year.
assignment != equality != identity
Clearly those panicking did not bother to read even the abstract. Not a single ferret died from airborne transmission which is how this flu would spread. It's not even clear whether this new kind of flu would be more dangerous than the present wild type flu viruses, which kill many people every year. Why on Earth are there so many people freaking out about what these scientists have done?
... why do we even bother? You know what... everyone get a nuke, everyone weaponize your virus of choice... why bother trying to preserve any semblance of world peace. Lets just nuke each other and get it over with...
Fire up the virology labs... lets make doomsday bugs. Sure billions might die but it's in the cause of science... and of course, lets tell every tin pot psychotic dictatorship how to make it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
then they'll get it
Hey, that chick I saw right before she vaporized, something else sure exploded.
Such a waste.
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BMO
hello, attention whore!!!!
Back when H5N1 was doing the rounds, my wife had a long running worse-than-average but not debilitating chest infection which came and went over two or three months; I had something pretty similar; and lots of people we know and work with had much the same. But none of us or them were ever diagnosed as having H5N1, because none of us got bad enough to see a doctor. My wife (a biologist who worked in an immunological research laboratory a while back) thinks that the H5N1 infection rate was really much much higher than it was supposed to be, but the infection was much much less severe than H5N1 was hyped to be in all those cases. If she's right - and it seems pretty plausible to me - then H5N1 was just not the risk it was painted as. Granted it was nastier than the average flu bug, but nothing like governments would have us believe. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
Something similar to that experiment is done every year. In many parts of the world people live in crowded conditions with close contact to pigs and chickens. A small number of people become infected with H5N1. A few die, most don't. If you did the experiment that you describe, you will probably end up with results similar those in the paper - people would get ill; maybe a few would die, probably from Al Qaeda medical care. If you want to be a terrorist, cheap explosives are more cost effective.
and the psychopaths who fund them?
...is to share the data. This fear mongering around the virus research is very similar to the state of mind that existed around symmetric crypto before AES came along. Open sourcing this study material will bring the best minds around the world to work on mitigating a potential epidemic. We can only hope its not too late, humanity has already lost half a year's time as a result of the decision to withhold the results. In fact, this censorship may have done more harm than good by bringing even more media attention to this virus. Now every that terrorist in the world knows "bird flu == potential pandemic", please report any suspicious behavior of people kissing chickens or ferrets to your nearest police station. I can just see the next Team America sequel going - "You in the robes, put down those chickens of mass destruction!"
Didn't someone (?Iran?) do this in a Tom Clancy book? IIRC they used aerosol distribution put it into AC system at trade shows who then all got onto airplanes.
As BMO said, even a simple terrorists could not get it right. Explosives are HARD. VERY HARD. handle them wrong, and they blow up early (plenty of ppl are proof of that). Do not do them right, and they do not blow up at all (ask the shoe and underwear bombers). Things like Military made explosions work because they were built under lab and factory specs. The chemicals went in PRECISELY. IOW, the chemists and techs know exactly how they will behave. But homemade explosives from every-day chemicals? Lots of work and easy to get wrong.
OTOH, doing a viral attack the way that I describe allows the terrorists to do all of the hard work in say pakistan, somalia, indonesia, China, Iran, North Korea, or Venezuela. Once they are done, it is trivial to get small ampules back into a multiple of nations. And no explosive weapon shy of a nuke can be so small and kill 100K to 100M ppl to potentially 1B all in several weeks, and without leaving a trace.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.