Should Smallpox Be Put To Death? | Hacker News Reader

Should Smallpox Be Put To Death?

pressblog.uchicago.edu

36 pointsdavi28 comments

The question is unnecessarily emotional and anthropomorphizes smallpox - smallpox hates that. The question is really "There is a threat contained in labs in the US and Russia. Should we eliminate it, or hold onto it for future research and as a backup for vaccinations in case of other, undeclared stocks?" This breaks down into a whole set of questions, I guess.

What is the probability of the virus escaping from the labs in Georgia and Siberia? What is the probability that there are undeclared stocks of the virus elsewhere? If the second is greater than the first, don't destroy the stocks because you may need them to recreate the vaccine. If the second is less than the first, by how much? And what is the consensus on risk appetite? How well can you ensure that the stocks really are destroyed if they are so ordered to be?

This should tell you the best answer based on safety.

The next set of questions relate to what can be learned from the current stocks. Is there an active research program? Is there a current list of things to learn, or are we just holding onto it 'in case'? Has there been a case that we were glad to have virus stocks that were previously held to be useless?

If there is no obvious gain from holding onto the stock for research and the most significant threat from the virus is accidental release, then destroy the stocks. Otherwise, hold onto them - you can't recreate the stocks from nothing yet and you can always destroy them later.

My gut tells me that we should hold onto them. I'm always loathe to throw opportunities away and that's really what these stocks represent.

Agreed. I actually met a guy a week ago that's working on monkey pox- the next big pox threat. He told me that it's a growing problem and more people are getting infected by it in Africa- larger than what would be explained by the fact that people have stopped vaccinating for small pox. It suggests that monkey pox is an "up and coming" virus. So there's active research on pox, and it's silly to simple throw it away.

The probability of the CDC's stock escaping is really very small, and let's face it, if we got rid of it once we could get rid of it again.

It was probably easier to get rid the first time than it would be a second time given the increase in air travel and density in population centers that has occurred since then.

The reasons given in the article for smallpox being able to be eradicated the first time was because

a) It has no animal reservoirs

b) The latent period of infection is very short

c) There's an effective vaccine

None of those things would be different the second time around, unless the viruses itself was changed.

Smallpox is "easy" to get rid of because it's visible. The infected present with lesions. It also isn't contagious while it incubates.

Contrast this with polio, where there are about a thousand infections per every paralysis. Thanks to a couple of ignorant leaders who claimed that the polio vaccine is a Western conspiracy to sterilize African girls, it's spreading again. Great.

What is the probability that there are undeclared stocks of the virus elsewhere? ... don't destroy the stocks because you may need them to recreate the vaccine.

If there was an outbreak, couldn't we quickly isolate the virus and have our stocks back?

Probably, but it would certainly cost human lives and effort. I'm not au fait with vaccine creation, so I cannot answer whether it is technically possible, but it seems probable.

> don't destroy the stocks because you may need them to recreate the vaccine.

It's worth noting that the US has a gigantic stockpile of smallpox vaccine already - and they're actually increasing the size of the stockpile because of worries about bioterrorism (in 2010 20 million doses of an updated and safer vaccine were added to the stockpile[1]). The vaccine is made with cowpox, so smallpox samples are not required for its production.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-05-25-smallpox25_ST...

The Soviet Union had tons of biological weapons, including smallpox, before, during and after the implementation of the Biological Weapons Convention treaty. People who worked in those laboratories and the associated germ warfare production facilities sometimes accidentally carried product home unwittingly, with predictable consequences.

Any hope for eradication is lost when somewhere, somehow, an as-yet-unopened bottle of bad stuff remains forgotten or hidden. And this is without considering bad intent.

So keep samples where you can get them quickly.

A much better essay arguing that smallpox be preserved: http://www.cdc.gov/eid/content/17/4/681.htm

Probably it's a good idea to get rid of any remaining smallpox samples, but to retain its DNA/RNA sequence for possible future study. The genomes for viruses are typically not very large. If you printed out HIV it's maybe a couple of sheets of A4 paper.

Smallpox is a weird virus.

A couple years ago I asked Tom Knight about the risk of someone ordering Smallpox oligos and making a viable virus. The problem is that it needs its own proteins to replicate. In other viruses it's sufficient to heat-shock the genome into the host. If we destroyed the viral stocks, it would be really hard to recover.

Nasty freaking virus, but I don't think destroying it is smart. I bet you could bring the risk of an outbreak close to zero just by vaccinating everyone who works with the virus and everyone that they live or work with. I suspect that this is already standard operating procedure.

Also, HIV is really tiny.

I'd say the possibility of recreating smallpox from custom oligos hinges on this: Is RNA polymerase one of the proteins that smallpox requires from its own genes, or would someone be able to use stock bacterial polymerases to recreate its full suite of proteins?

Isn't there way more deadly and virulent stuff locked up in labs all over the world, like ebola and anthrax and VX? And we don't know what medical discoveries smallpox might yield decades down the road. Let's not destroy anything.

Ebola's not that deadly, because it kills people too quickly and the transmission process is difficult. It's easily quarantined and therefore deadly to individuals, but not to populations. Smallpox is almost the opposite - 66% of victims survive, but it spreads very easily.

Anthrax is naturally-occurring, I think and also not that deadly in the scheme of things - it doesn't spread very easily from infected to non-infected without being weaponized.

Your point is completely valid, but I have to point out how wonderful what you said sounds out of context.

  Ebola's not that deadly, because it kills people too quickly

It's a shame that anthrax gets so much press, simply because of the (small) potential for weaponization. In spite of the fact that it doesn't easily spread between people. I've heard it's almost impossible to get approved to work with it, and when you do, every move you make is scrutinized.

Yes, but those things exist in the wild, not just in the laboratory.

It should be preserved. The reason why is that you will never be able to say with 100% certainty that the disease is eradicated. So should someone get a hold of smallpox we'll be able to begin making a vaccine much sooner than we could of if we had to get a new sample.

Smallpox is a special case because we don't need smallpox to make smallpox vaccine. Smallpox vaccine is made from cowpox.

Is that really still the case today?

Another way to look at this question is: If it didn't exist should we create it?

Earth could be invaded by aliens, someday, and find ourselves unable to overthrow them. We may find that they are not susceptible to any of our biological options, either. We may start wishing that we had something like small-pox to unleash on their home-world. Not something we'd want to do lightly, but if they assert themselves as our overlords, we may have no other choice.

Unlikely, but let's just play with this...

For all we know, "they" engineered smallpox and are actually immune to it. It was sent to Earth as an engineered precursor to their arrival.

Is this an argument that would actually convince you, were you otherwise undecided? I don't consider the probability of that scenario happening (let alone succeeding) high enough to even blink at, I'm sure accidental / malicious release are far more probable, even if they're also not very likely. "Just in case" can be a valid reason to keep something, but the question is always "Just in case of what?" I think nagrom asks the right questions for this.

Edit: if you were being sarcastic, sorry, I'll go get an energy drink!

I don't see small pox as being unique. If we get rid of it, we need to get rid of everything else. I think we still keep ebola, for example. Frankly, there is simply no way of knowing the future (though I agree, there's no way of ensuring security of samples into the future, either). We worry about destruction of rainforests, because we have no idea what cures and solutions we might find in the undiscovered life within that could be lost forever. Likewise, we simply don't know what today's "horror of horrors" could find beneficial use, some day.

In the event that we are invaded by aliens, I would count the success of unleashing small pox on them as being much greater than Jeff Goldblum infecting them with a virus from his macbook. :P

When it comes down to it, though, I don't think there's a right answer. We just have to make an educated judgement call. Maybe the kind of judgement call where we respond to things like "but if we torture people, we can find terrorists!" with "but that's not the kind of people we are". Maybe we really do need to be the kind of people who say we're not willing to risk exposing innocent people to this for some future that we are only guessing about. Or maybe it's enough to simply map the genome and keep the data on it archived, while dumping the actual real deal.

"Jeff Goldblum infecting them with a virus from his macbook."

Ugh. Citing that does not signal you as knowledgeable about computers, it signals you as profoundly ignorant. In the real world, viruses for Windows can and have been served by Unix systems running entirely different architectures via exploited websites. We don't even have to get into the theory of the matter, we can demonstrate cross-OS virus transmission in practice. Bits are, quite profoundly, merely bits. They do not have a Mac or Windows or Alien color: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

While I'm sure beyond a shadow of a doubt this was accidental, the idea that a fundamentally telepathic and possibly hive-mindish species of alien may have advanced computers and no concept of computer security because they have no concept or biological possibility of generating a computer hacker is actually a respectable sci-fi speculative idea.

Keeping around one particular instantiation of a DNA sequence because it might be useful against a low-probability event isn't useful, because in the grand space of potential DNA-based solutions to such a problem, the smallpox virus is vanishingly small and effectively no different from just deciding to hook a random number generator up to a DNA sequencer, shoving the results into a virus shell, and hoping for the best.

> I would count the success of unleashing small pox on them

Unless they have cellular machinery that can reproduce smallpox, there is zero chance of such an attack being successful.

And the odds of an alien species having biochemistry compatible with earthlings is vanishingly small.

Besides that, our chances against a civilization capable of interstellar travel are a rounding error above zero. I would say zero, but they may be so alien as to mistake us for the rocks we live on.

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