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> others have just passed an infected person on the subway and died.

Who? That's a false, alarmist rumor and the parent reads like a "technothriller", which is probably the wrong way to talk about real diseases that might alarm people. Remember during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, some people coming to the U.S., including a nurse who was effectively imprisoned, were subject of a public panic that had nothing to do with reality. There was no risk. Ebola, like any disease, is contagious only in certain ways. The U.S. CDC says:

https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/transmission/index.html

The virus spreads through direct contact (such as through broken skin or mucous membranes in the eyes, nose, or mouth) with:

* Blood or body fluids (urine, saliva, sweat, feces, vomit, breast milk, and semen) of a person who is sick with or has died from EVD

* Objects (such as needles and syringes) contaminated with body fluids from a person sick with EVD or the body of a person who died from EVD

* Infected fruit bats or nonhuman primates (such as apes and monkeys)

* Semen from a man who recovered from EVD (through oral, vaginal, or anal sex)

The Ebola virus CANNOT spread to others when a person shows no signs or symptoms of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD). ... There is also no evidence that mosquitoes or other insects can transmit Ebola virus.

Please don't spread these rumors. EDIT: It also distracts people from the real risks.

Ebola may be made airborne locally as some body fluids may be aerosolized during rapid expulsion of air from the lungs.

Yep, this is sneezing. Ebola is scary because it is one of the most contagious diseases.

But in any complex system, it's very hard to predict who will contract the disease and who won't. You can see similar scenarios play out after Chernobyl, where some people who were very close to the reactor which blew up where seemingly unaffected and lived long lives, while others who were relatively far away passed from radiation exposure or the subsequent cancers.

> Ebola is scary because it is one of the most contagious diseases.

Ebola isn't particularly contagious. It has a R0 of ~2. Measles for example is 10.

Well sure, but that's a seriously high bar you're comparing it with. Measles is regarded as one of the most contagious diseases on earth, no?

Exactly, and how fatal is Measles?

> Ebola may be made airborne locally as some body fluids may be aerosolized during rapid expulsion of air from the lungs.

Really? The CDC disagrees:

The virus spreads through direct contact (such as through broken skin or mucous membranes in the eyes, nose, or mouth) with ...

Who are you? What evidence do you have?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112746

That's the thing about viruses. Ebola-Zaire was as you describe for humans. But Ebola-Reston was airborne-transmissable to (Rhesus?) monkeys.

> Ebola-Reston was airborne-transmissable to (Rhesus?) monkeys

Uh-oh. Better keep your Rhesus monkey out of Ebola zones.

If its airborne transmissible, it could transfer both ways, right?

Besides, if you live in an area with Rhesus monkeys, your snide comment is not applicable.

No. Provide some evidence that it's even transmissible one way or that it's transmissible the other. This is HN; have some pride in not passing around unfounded alarmist nonsense.

> if you live in an area with Rhesus monkeys, your snide comment is not applicable

Ha ha ha ... awesome! I couldn't have written a better parody of this nonsense if I tried.

Here's some unfounded alarmist nonsense for you:

"Limited airborne transmission of Ebola is ‘very likely,’ new analysis says"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/0...

Quote from the article: "As evidence, the research notes that Ebola virus has been found on the outside of face masks worn by health workers caring for victims of the disease. It also points out that the virus has been passed between animals via respiration. And the authors say that Ebola can infect certain cells of the respiratory tract, including epithelial cells, which line body cavities, and macrophages, a type of white blood cell that consumes pathogens.

The paper notes that breathing, sneezing, coughing and talking can release droplets of fluid from the respiratory tract that travel short distances and most likely cause infection by settling on a mucous membrane. Those actions also release smaller airborne particles capable of suspension in mid-air that can be inhaled by others. Technically, both qualify as aerosols, the paper says."

And then I consider where those smaller airborne particles might land that could be ingested by people/animals. Say, in an open marketplace where there are produce/food vendors shooing Rhesus monkeys away.

I don't know if you've ever ridden the subway, but coming into contact with someone's bare skin, even broken skin, is not unheard of in a crowded subway. So it's plausible that your cat scratched arm could come in contact with some infected person's sweaty arm as you try to make your way through a crowded subway car.

It's certainly plausible that someone with an early stage infection may take the subway to go to a doctor. I've seen plenty of obviously sick people on the train (and I keep my distance, not because I think they have Ebola, but because I don't want to catch whatever illness they do have)

That's different from "just passing an infected person"

I've had people bleed on my on the SF MUNI, it's thoroughly disgusting and scary.

> I don't know if you've ever ridden the subway

Many, many times.

> it's plausible that your cat scratched arm could come in contact with some infected person's sweaty arm as you try to make your way through a crowded subway car.

You've got to be kidding me.

Again, who has ever caught Ebola on a subway?

Again, who has ever caught Ebola on a subway?

Good question - how many times has there been a significant Ebola outbreak in a city with a subway system?

Mbandaka is not exactly a bustling metropolis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbandaka#/media/File:Stadsaanz...

> The real concern here is what this means for the future of warfare.

I don't think Ebola is likely to play a role in the future of warfare. Based conversations with Sergei Popov [0], in his experience making biological weapons, viruses generally make for poor weapons because they're difficult to deploy / release. Their work led to them to favor B. anthracis and other sporulating bacteria. You'd probably have to invent a new kind of platform for deployment if you want viral weapons to be targeted. I can see how viruses could be used in terrorism or something comparable to arson, but their use by a state seems unlikely.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Popov_(bioweaponeer)

> but their use by a state seems unlikely.

One would suspect there would be a certain appeal for clandestine purposes, assuming one can make them hard-to-attribute. Plausible deniability is a useful thing for nation-states. Just look at Russia.

> assuming one can make them hard-to-attribute

I think it'd be difficult to attribute. The release platform and preparation that's used would probably be the most identifying feature, rather than the organism. In the case of the 2001 anthrax attacks that was (some claimed) the silicon content, which the FBI thought suggested some expert weaponization knowledge and material. IIRC, Popov explained away that saying that you could just mix in some Gas-X [1].

So maybe even investigation into the preparation wouldn't really point to the source.

And, yeah, rereading my comment, my concept of both "state" and "warfare" is probably too simple

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeticone

> assuming one can make them hard-to-attribute

Luckily bio-weapons come with their own tracking tags.

From DNA we can reconstruct its origin. So it is not ideal for clandestine operations.

Could you extrapolate a bit on that? I'm ignorant on the topic, so I have no idea how a tracking tag would work for a living organism.

DNA is inherited from parent to offspring. While new changes occur, a large amount of the DNA between the two are the same, compared to non-related organisms.

This allows us to reconstruct the history, or in cases where there is less data, infer the history of two different organisms. We can roughly tell where, and when one population split from another.

In the case of bio-weapons, we can tell if the organism came from a culture in a current laboratory, or if it was generated in secrete. If the latter, we can tell what part of the world the original sample came from. All of this are clues to discovering the culprits.

A famous example is the 2001 Anthrax attack in DC. They were able to match the DNA from the anthrax to a US military strain located in Maryland. This led them to a former researcher who most law enforcement believe was the culprit in the attacks.

> Based conversations with Sergei Popov

This guy seems like as close as possible to a real life Bond villian. How do you know him?

The real concern here is the people dying right now. The "future of warfare" is no warfare - it's exactly this kind of thinking that drives "well we should research it because someone else most definitely is" type of scenario's, which is what got us into the nuclear mess.

I don't think nuclear weapons and biological warfare are comparable. Nuclear weapons give a country that has them a near total advantage over a country that doesn't in conventional warfare. That's the whole reason countries want nuclear programs: to prevent other countries from using nukes on them.

Biological warfare seems less likely to be used by a stable country because its consequences are so hard to predict and it isn't very targeted.

And the future of warfare isn't no warfare unfortunately. War and violence are human universals. We can definitely do things to make it occur less frequently, but one of those things is having strong deterrents to war in the form of a strong military.

That's actually why Anthrax was researched as a bio-warfare agent. Goes airborne spores to human so collect the spores and you get an airborne agent, but it's very bad at Human to Human transmission basically requiring direct contact with open spores.

They're hard to predict if you're using something contagious like Influenza. For non-contagious agents like Anthrax (lethal) or Tularemia (mostly just incapacitating) they function more as extra-potent versions of chemical weapons. The Soviets had Anthrax warheads on a number of their ICBMs aimed at US cities back in the day[1], they weren't considered good counterforce weapons but they made good countervalue weapons so if a country's doctrine isn't oriented around a first strike like the US's was they make sense.

And given the possibility of nuclear winter you could argue that non-contagious biological weapons are a lot less likely to get out of control.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak

The real trick is to weaponize them in a way that they spread optimally and then disperse them in a way that avoids detection as long as possible.

North Korea has had bio-weapon development program for a long time and has conducted human experiments with prisoners. They also might do larger scale testing in remote islands. No need to Biosafety level 4 laboratory if the researches are not allowed leave the lab and go home every night. If things go south, you torch the island including the people and start over after few years.

It's almost impossible to know how good they are in bio-weapons until they use them.

> The Japanese cult that put Sarin in the Tokyo subway in 1996 was also working on biological weapons, they never got far enough, but it demonstrated even non-state actors can pull of credible bio-weapons.

They got pretty far.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/1/03-0238_article

Biology implements its own blockchain, kind of, so it's pretty easy to track down a common ancestor with enough samples. The oldest one gives you the release location and potentially some information about where it was sourced/created if you have enough information from before the event-- For example, tracking anthrax down to a sample collected from a specific farm during a cattle outbreak and then looking at people who were in the area. In contrast, software viruses don't accumulate changes unless they're under active development.

Chemical and nuclear stuff can possibly be attributed by looking at isotopic composition or impurities, to determine manufacturing process. But doesn't really tell you anything unique. Exceptions are e.g. polonium which where only a few state agencies are known to be able to make it.

The classic, scary chemical weapons (e.g. cholinesterase inhibitors, Sarin) themselves are kitchen chemistry. Ricin, even nastier to die from, is barn chemistry in that it's essentially castor bean tea. However, I suspect that people who manufacture on the cheap usually kill themselves and anyone with enough knowledge and resources to not kill themselves often don't want to make chemical weapons.