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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."
>Censored for a half year
Read the summary much?
How long does censorship have to last before it's "safe" to release research?
What about next time? A year? Two? Never?
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BMO
That time? ... When they develop also develop the antidote or cure.
>When they develop also develop the antidote or cure.
No released research = no cure.
Your move.
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BMO
Sadly, this scenario of "the end of civilisation" is more likely than nuclear war. Presumably, just like the black death, not all would die, but the impact would be just as devastating as any WWIII
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.
You seem to be forgetting that nobody has ever been able to "cure" a virus ever. EVER. Antibacterials and antifungals exist but nothing kills viruses. "Antiviral" medicines do something else. So I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for a magical viral cure.
By the way, vaccine != cure.
In my opinion, anyone purposely working on a more dangerous version of a deadly flu for very close to no reason, they should be shut down immediately. They're turning "Let's prepare for 'what if' by studying potential mutations" into "Well, there it is. I hope nobody steals it." How did it get this far?
The people doing this research are also capable of creating vaccines, etc.
[citation needed]. Would appreciate if you can find citations showing their capability to produce quantities large enough if needed in a pandemic.
Wonder-Twin powers - deactivate logic! Form of: internet argument!
As far as actual capabilities of the researchers go, the creation of a vaccine is accomplished by creating a mutated form of the virus that triggers an autoimmune response without causing the harmful symptoms. The science is exactly the same as creating any other mutated form, such as one that can be spread via mammalian respiration, a.k.a. the paper they authored.
And the capability to create has nothing to do with the capability to mass-produce. If that were true, you'd still be waiting for George Lucas to make you your very own VHS copy of Star Wars in his VCR. (Spoiler: by the time he gets around to recording yours, Chewbacca will have shot first!)
John
Security through obscurity can quite easily result in far greater loss. I would much rather have years of research done on dangerous pathogens and risk someone developing a weapon based upon it than have someone develop a dangerous pathogen no one's ever seen before without anyone who's an expert at studying virus propagation and mutation because someone got scared and banned the research.
In the former case, you already have experts on hand who are intimately familiar with the virus, giving them a leg up on developing a vaccine. Even better - the published research is more likely to provide a subtle nudge towards the same line of pathogens, keeping any would-be bio-terrorists from coming up with anything too terribly exotic. In the latter case, we're left years behind the race towards a vaccine and may not even have any experts available to start the research (as it's been banned). All the ground-breaking knowledge will be locked away behind the closed doors of those with calamitous intent.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
In my opinion, anyone purposely working on a more dangerous version of a deadly flu for very close to no reason, they should be shut down immediately.
Well, it's a good thing they have a really good reason then. They want to prevent a pandemic flu.
A pandemic is caused by a novel influenza virus that we are not immune to, and can spread itself quickly from infected host to uninfected human via airborne droplets.
As you pointed out, viruses do not die. The host's autoimmune system either learns how to control the more lethal strains, or the host dies. And we've learned the host's autoimmune system can be trained by inoculating it with a strain of the virus that looks very similar to the lethal strain, yet does not contain the machinery that typically causes sickness or death. We call this process vaccination.
We know the influenza virus lives for a long while in a non-human animal population (pigs, birds, horses), slowly mutating away from something our human autoimmune systems used to be able to recognize into a new form of the disease. This is called drift. (Reassortment is another mutational path that leads to new forms of the virus.) Judging by the regularity with which we are afflicted by pandemic flu viruses, this seems to happen about every 20 years. As we approach that 20 year mark, the occasional cross-species infection will occur, as the virus hops into some unlucky human who was in direct contact with the infected host. At that time, it's evident that there's a new form of the disease to which we're no longer immune.
We also know that every so often natural mutations will confer the ability to become transmissible to humans via airborne droplets that are exhaled by a carrier. Once that happens, the virus is able to spread among humans very rapidly.
So there are two things nature needs to create a new strain of pandemic flu: novelty and transmissibility. Once we see the novel form, it's time to create a vaccine that hopefully will lessen its impact before the time it naturally becomes transmissible on its own.
But mutations are mutations. We don't know for certain that the mutant form that's transmissible is still similar enough to the novel form for our autoimmune systems to recognize them both (keep in mind that the non-lethal form cultured for the vaccine is already somewhat different from the lethal form.) So the researchers are trying to study the possible mutations so they can test and develop the vaccines before they're actually needed in the wild.
tl;dr - they need to do this research, or a lot of people will die.
John
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?
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?