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GlaxoSmithKline Released 45 Liters of Live Polio Virus
ferespo sends this news out of Belgium: As reported to ECDC by Belgian authorities, on 2 September 2014, following a human error, 45 liters of concentrated live polio virus solution were released into the environment by the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline in Rixensart city, Belgium. The liquid was conducted directly to a water-treatment plant (Rosieres) and released after treatment in river Lasne affluent of river Dyle which is affluent of the Escaut/Scheldt river. Belgium's High Council of Public Health conducted a risk assessment that concluded that the risk of infection for the population exposed to the contaminated water is extremely low due to the high level of dilution and the high vaccination coverage (95%) in Belgium.
You mean, "Burp!"
Table-ized A.I.
And see what happens ...
I can't imagine any.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
That Wolf Blitzer has at the moment. Between this and Ebola, CNN has the next few months of programming on a silver platter.
But haven't we eradicated polio? Of what use, then, is cultivating concentrated polio?
How the fuck does this even happen? What were they doing with a ANY number of liters of polio near the water?
Can anyone explain why a pharmaceutical company is doing ANYTHING near a water treatment facility?
Yeah, Derp indeed. That website is full of conspiracy theories. What a load of crap.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
45 liters, even concentrated, of polio virus does not pose great danger, especially since it went into a modern sewage treatment facility. I am a polio victim myself, got it in 1966, 10 years after Salk released the vaccine in USA, but I was in rural South India with very very poor sanitary conditions. All through high school in every class I had another polio victim, typical class sizes are 50 to 60 in India at that time. So it works out to some 4% of the sample population (account for survivor bias, the dead victims did not make it into this sample). I was lucky, lost just part functionality in one leg. Right now in the slums of India, Pakisan and Bangladesh people are living constantly exposed to polio and still the infection rate is not all that high. So we need not go hyperbolic with this news.
Let us not underreact
We are giving more and more rights to the corporations, equating money with speech and even religious beliefs to corporations. But when it comes to criminal penalties they get to use limited liability corporation laws. Do not go after the underlings. Top management should not be able to create policy documents on one hand, then create incentive systems that encourage the violation of the same policies, and claim immunity, "Well, that employee violated our own established policy. It is her fault. Don't you think of touching my bonus!". Nominal financial penalties for those who were negligent are in order. But extraordinary penalties, amounting to all the pay and bonuses collected by the upper management in the last five or ten years should be assessed. Their performance review policies should be reviewed, and if they have practices that create perverse incentives to violate their own corporate policies, even harsher penalties are in order.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Homeopaths claim that a very diluted concentration of something harmful can actually be used to treat the symptoms it causes. So GlaxoSmithKline has just created the most potent homeopathic remedy for polio known to man!
Would have been useful to takeout all the mindless celebrities who don't vaccinate their children and thus assure a healthier society for us all.
Should have released it in LA where there is a higher % of population that is choosing to opt out of vaccination.
Well now, that sure as hell escalated quickly.
I guess we're skipping out on the tinfoil hat fashion show and going straight for fall jacket season.
... palace guard. Some sort of possibly armed unit that literally controls who has the virus from one moment to the next.
Right. Because this expensive and complicated solution would have prevented all zero of the infections that resulted from this release.
a bigger penalty for the kind of plastic container the glop was in.
It appears that someone accidentally dumped the wrong bucket down the drain .
From that, you infer:
> create incentive systems that encourage the violation of the same policies, and claim immunity, ... Nominal financial penalties for those who were negligent are in order. But extraordinary penalties, amounting to all the pay and bonuses collected by the upper management in the last five or ten years should be assessed.
At this point, we have no idea what policies were in place, what the incentives were, or how upper management is going to respond.
As far as we know, upper management could have had monthly safety audits, with large bonuses to staff every time they got a perfect score on the audit, and clear penalties for any infraction. As far as we know, while management was doing a superb job, one of the staff scientists came in with a horrible hangover and the first thing they did was clean up their work area by dumping out the "cleaning solution " they had been using the day before. Or maybe it was the opposite. We don't know. We really have no idea what happened at this point. In many workplaces I'm familiar with , the most likely cause would be that management chose policies that involved being so extremely careful that it got to be a pain in the ass, so staff started to ignore some of the policies because it was annoying to spend so much time on it, with 30 minutes of safety procedures required to perform a two minute task.
Okay, now it would be extremely risky for a pharmaceutical company to do this on purpose, but I can't help wondering what this did to their sales of polio vaccine booster shots...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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I think the real danger is not that little Timmy is going to go swimming and drink some polio, but that it is possible (however unlikely, IANA virologist) for the released polio virus to find a reservoir in some of the local wildlife and cause further trouble at a later date.
What's crap? The ECDC is linked in the summary.
Ever heard the phrase, "even a broken clock is right twice a day?"
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Yep, so we should only implement controls after the bad stuff happens.
If this was reported immediately, the sewerage plant could increase their chlorine injection to far higher levels than usual. Chlorine will destroy polio virus. Sewerage plants usually chlorinate at a modest level to kill bacteria, but in an emergency like this, they can easily crank the levels way up. Sewerage plants are constantly adjusting their systems depending on what's coming in.
If the safety people at GlaxoSmithKlein, or whoever this was reported to, called the plant operator at the sewer plant, there would have been immediate agreement to crank up chlorination levels, and sampling would have been started at the sewerage plant. The reports, which indicate after the fact analysis, indicate that didn't happen.
What bad stuff happened?
The solution to pollution is dilution.
Ha ha. As if LA has rivers.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
How is it even legal for GlaxoSmithKlein to own LITERS of polio?
Yes, lets punish 99,000 workers with job loss for the mistake of one.
They should do that in the US to kill off all the anti-vax-tards.
LA as in Los Angeles, or as in Louisiana
The links aren't very informative.
Is it one of the weakened strains that's used for making oral polio vaccine? Those aren't terribly dangerous as they're already given orally to kids. They also tend to be present in the water in the areas oral vaccine is still given, as people shed the vaccine strain virus as they are building immunity.
Is it a full up wild type polio that might be used at some stage of making the injected vaccine?
And that's just a couple of questions I've got. Details makes a difference.
If you're talking about a novel, see Alistair MacLean's "The Satan Bug", which was derived from, as it happens, polio.
I'm unaware of a real life instance, (life imitates art?) but would like to know more.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
We are regularly told that advanced Western nations shouldn't worry about Ebola, because we have advanced Western medicine, and aren't like those poor and primitive African nations. And then things like this happen. Or the recent CDC biohazard scandals. Or the hospital in Texas, just trained about Ebola, sends a recent arrival from Liberia who is showing symptoms back to his relatives with some antibiotics. And then, after he vomits on the sidewalk on the way back to the hospital, people without protective gear "clean it up" with a pressure hose, while a sandal-wearing woman walks by . And they reuse the ambulance before they decontaminate it. And the family violates their quarantine.
So when Top Men tell us there's no danger of an outbreak here, I am not reassured.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Point one, it's deactivated, not diluted.
Point two, it isn't diluted to the point where it's statistically pure water.
But apart from that, you're 100% correct.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Why not just take the existing corporation and transfer it lock stock and barrel to public ownership/
Of course if we did that abortions and gay marriage would be compulsory, because cormernizzem.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Darwinism?
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Glaxo makes drugs. Polio is treated by drugs. This sounds like a win/win for Glaxo! Now if some person had released 45 liters of concentrated live polio virus into the water supply, that might be considered a successful act of terrorism, but Glaxo is a corporation, so everyone should see that it's different!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Based on your utter and complete lack of knowledge about the situation, you've completely made things up in your own head and you're ready to crucify the first person you see.
I specifically said, don't rail road some low level schmuck and go after the big guys who have lot more to lose. As long as corporations can blame low level employees and let the big fish get away free, these things will keep happening. To prevent recurrence, big guys should lose big. Otherwise we don't mean it and they wouldn't care.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Explain how my concept doesn't solve the problem please.
Because there's no problem. This article is mostly clickbait.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Actually my idea would have stopped this release as well as... all of the improper releases of plague samples over the last few decades.
So why haven't you patented the ide...oh, never mind.
Explain how my concept doesn't solve the problem please.
because dogecoin. (you're welcome)
so if you're not in charge your ideas are automatically bad? ... yawn... so many morons.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Since this happened a month ago, you should have included the followup story about possible infected shellfish...
Clarify your position. You were so busy making a joke that you failed to make a clear point.
Please rephrase.
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You obviously don't work with too many security guards, it's the kind of job a lot of people take after being fired from Walmart or McDonalds. Introduce one of these bozos into the mix and you've just quintupled the likelihood of a catastrophic release.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Explain how my concept doesn't solve the problem please.
Because giving a bunch of humans a boring,monotonous job doesn't solve the problem of humans making errors, which is what caused this release in the first place.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
yawn... so many morons.
Agreed!
Nah, just have a small squad of armed personnel, ready to go and shoot anyone who fucks up like GSK did, along with shooting the management-team.
That should fix things after 2-3 incidents..
Nah, they'll just cover it up. You have to have the samples actively controlled by someone with a job that is specifically to control the samples and nothing else.
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Then clearly factory assembly lines don't work... Thanks for just very quickly pointing out you're stupid. It makes this much more efficient.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Horrible and sad news!!! Poor viruses!
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Nah, not close. One was accidental, the other wasn't. We can forgive you.
There is a shortage of trained and competent people, worldwide, already. I'm a physical security professional, I've worked with a lot of good security personnel, and a lot more really, really bad. The really, really bad tend to be much cheaper and more plentiful. In the real world, which do you think chemical and drug companies are going to end up using?
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I don't think the chemical and drug companies are going to hire them. By concept is that they would be assigned and the accepting that oversight would come with accepting the samples.
Look, you're so hostile to the concept that I don't feel comfortable sharing ideas. I'm just spit balling here and you're making no attempt to be constructive.
So let us just assume you disagree and move on.
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Hognoxious, would nationalization fix the broken corporate culture that led to the takeover in the first place? I doubt it. Better to kill the corporation and put it out of our misery like we used to do in the 19th century.
I write sci-fi for metalheads