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Why Do Pathogen Researchers Face Less Scrutiny Than Nuclear Scientists?
Lasrick writes "Derrin Culp of the National Center for Disease Preparedness explores the different levels of scrutiny that scientists in microbiology undergo, when compared to those who work in the nuclear weapons field. His complaint is that, even though America's most notorious biosecurity breach — the 2001 anthrax mailings — was the work of an insider, expert panels have concluded that there is no need for intrusive monitoring of microbiologists engaged in unclassified research."
1. Biological agents are readily available. ;-)
2. Biological agents are naturally dangerous ie H5N1 is killing people.
3. Reseach into these agents will provide positive outcomes. ie vaccines
4. Stupid measures such as profiles fail the best researchers, eg NSA fails more than 50% of maths researchers. Those creative left handed types are dangerous. It's actually true that NSA employs fewer left handed people than the research community at large and is an acknowledged problem.
5. Research doesn't have many resources, wasting them upon dumb controls means much less reseach.
6 The military has oodles of cash (read wasteful) however they're not allowed to play with biological weapons so biology doesn't get much of this cash. (unlike nukes)
Oh, yes. A doomsday device that gets preyed upon by every protozoan, yeast, and bacterium in the world. How brilliant. At least that rules out any organization other than a lunatic from employing it!
Why do you think MRSA—by all means a real, legitimate biological threat that isn't the fantasy of a powerhungry politician—is only found in hospitals and factory farms? The metabolic cost of the antibiotic resistance makes it vulnerable to the environment. The more radically efficient a disease is, the worse it is at killing. Even exceptional pathogens are meagre: "during the outbreak the fatality of SARS was less than 1% for people aged 24 or younger, 6% for those 25 to 44, 15% for those 45 to 64, and more than 50% for those over 65."
Furthermore, what would controlling American researchers accomplish? The United States does not have a monopoly on disease research. Surely a much greater threat comes from disease research laboratories in less developed countries with more corrupt governments rather than the exceptional person in a generally healthy, secure, and safe working and living environment. Moreover, despite the lack of a direct oversight mechanism, there is still a great deal of internal review, and it is implausible that an academic would have the resources to work on a project such as this without scrutiny and authorization.
Ultimately, this approach seeks to treat with suspect people who do sensitive work. In less fortunate populations that has been shown very thoroughly to induce criminality. Ivins, the prime suspect of the "Amerithrax" case, was known to be mentally unstable and once saw a counsellor, who was apparently terrified of him. He should have been directed to another therapist, but wasn't.
So there you have it. The only real scenario that has ever occurred, which this policy seeks to prevent, and it was caused by a failure of the psychiatric system. And no one died.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The consequences of the material getting out are worse with the pathogens because it doesn't take any technical capability at all to start the spread of the pathogen. All a person has to do is get infected, or get another person infected.
Steal 20 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium and you have 20 of raw material that you need a Ph.D. and a lot of engineering knowledge to convert into a bomb that can kill millions of people.
Also, the pathogen is millions of times easier to conceal.
I wrote an article on the Ulterior Motives: That killed the best nuclear solution to date for the US for nearly seventy years. That solution is LFTR Nuclear Reactors, If it hadn't been for the Oil industry, Nuclear Bombs, and Other Alternative Energy Movements, we would have a nearly endless supply of safe and cheap power. It goes to show you spreading FUD does pay off. Every time I post a message about LFTR reactors someone inevitable says something that is unfounded. Being as impartial a write as possible, I always entertain the arguments by giving them counter arguments which takes a lot of time from research for the defense. Nuclear is a solution and a good one. One the US would be smart to invest in. It would kill the Global Warming problem in 10 years with the right effort with the least environmental impact of any solution that can be deployed to date.
So far diagnosis of prion infections can only be reliably done using post-mortem detection of PrP, which is too late in most cases. The incubation period of most prion disease, measured in months and years, makes it a very poor bio-weapon candidate. While the argument can be made that military research can make progress toward that end, the practical reality is that it is still a not very well understood disorder and a lot of basic research is still needed despite intense and public scrutiny (for obvious reasons) from the agricultural sector of developed nations. Treatment options at the moment are virtually non-existent. Containment and culling to halt the spread of infection is still the order of the day in most agro scenarios. But this has been difficult where the infection exists in wild populations. Studies from a Colorado wildlife research facility where chronic wasting disease is endemic in local elks and deers have shown that prion infections can persist dispite conventional cleaning and sterilization methods. Other research shows that livestock to human transmission are not the only cross-species cases with examples being observed in minks from fur farms and guinea pigs in the laboratory also being suceptable. Such realities have resulted in hunters and recipients of venison from road kill being publicly cautioned from consuming the meat of animals from area known to have infected populations. There are a few efforts in very early experimental stages, but owing to the still very immature understanding of prions in general, it is still effectively a fatal disease with know cure/treatment options in human.
========== "Hello World" in my programming language of choice: ATG - LET THERE BE LIFE - TAG ==========
As I understand it, the body is quite efficient at neutralizing viruses or bacteria that it has encountered before because the body has to create antibodies that can kill a particular virus, but once those antibodies are created they can be recreated very fast. That's why vaccine works. The flu and cold viruses mutate rapidly so each time you get infected it's a "new" virus because your body could get rid of the old virus quite fast the second time.
On the other hand, if somebody engineered a virus that has static genes, but very high mortality rate, it would no matter, since people would only get infected by it once (which would be the "first time") and then they would die. After all, human bodies do not keep a centralized antivirus database for the entire population ("John was infected by a similar virus once, here's how you build the antibodies"), just for the individual.
So, the effectiveness of a static virus would most likely be limited by how fast a vaccine can be created and distributed.