Man-made super flu could kill half of humanity
rt.com
rt.com
20th century: mankind can destroy mankind.
21st century: man can destroy mankind.
Edit: let me just add that I'm extremely positive about the future, it's just that there are certain challenges that we as a society must deal with.
The ability for one man or a small group of men to more or less wipe out the human race will be in our reach within perhaps just a few years.
We can deal with this by different control mechanisms in our society. I'm a firm believer in the transparent society but the way things are going right now we seem to be moving towards a government controlled big brother society.
Is that the way we want it? Now is the time to discuss these issues if we want to change route.
http://dreaming5gw.com/5gw_lexicon/s/super-empowered-individ...
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/
Kul att se dig hær førresten :)
I'm not a big fan of government secrecy either but if the choice is between that and self-extinction, well...! Our Stone Age circumstances have left us with some pretty predatorial instincts and drives. It makes sense to put in safeguards to protect us from our own giant technological reach. It gives us time to let our social/cultural immune systems catch up.
And these probably don't have to be permanent - I'm not sure, but it does feel like we're moving towards greater freedom over time. Look at the chemicals you can buy in any hardware store or pharmacy today, and the instruction guides freely available on the internet. Individuals can already cause asymmetrically large harm but generally don't, because we're already fairly self-domesticated.
(Credit to Simon of Space for this line of thought - http://cheeseburgerbrown.com/stories/Simon_of_Space/)
Also, say the title is not misleading and they publish the results and some crazy dictator gets his hands on it. First, he has to be crazy enough to want to develop a virus that has a 50% chance of killing him. Then he has to find scientists that are willing to develop the virus that has a 50% chance of killing them and their family and friends, etc. The likelihood of all these things transpiring seems relatively low.
On the other hand, this research seems to indicate that it's not wholly unlikely that this kind of virus mutation could transpire organically, in which case this "recipe" being public knowledge would be instrumental in fighting the disease. Even if it doesn't arise organically (crazy terrorist convinces crazy scientists) the public knowledge of it would still reduce the 50% death rate.
And I also feel that the kind of sentiments that lead people to claim that this research should never have been performed in the first place are misguided. This kind of tinkering and hacking around is likely what would lead to the next big cure, etc. Never stop scientists from learning new things.
Interestingly that might give some crazy dictator or lone crazy scientist an incentive to perhaps develop and release it in some particular region of the world. If it looks like a natural mutation then it will be harder to find the culprit.
As an aside there's something about the article saying that it required 10 generations of breeding that makes me think that this development is alarmingly low hanging fruit. Could this article be enough for someone to figure out how to recreate the strain?
Edit: I should add, however, that the H5N1 threat is very real and very troubling. Not end-of-the-world troubling, but set-humanity-back-a-handful-of-decades troubling to be sure...
The difference between bioweapons and nuclear weapons is the former don't require the resources of a state. It could just as easily be done by a few grad students. Maybe even a single grad student.
"You would need more than a garage; you would need a great
garage and a lot of money. And it's not trivial. You need
the oligonucleotides to stitch genes together, and as far
as I know, most companies will check the order if the
sequence represents that of a dangerous virus."
> Professor David Tidmarsh, vice-chancellor of Birmingham City University, says [. . .] the university is investing £180m in new buildings, facilities and equipment.
> At Oxford, average spend per student fell to £11,232 in 2009-10 from £11,410 the year before. The university spends substantially more than other institutions. Cambridge spent £8,612 in 2009-10, a rise from £8,118 the year before.*
Rough guide to student numbers (pdf) (http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/global/wwwoxacuk/localsites/gazett...)
In particular, it is funny how programmers, who make their living by controlling complicated systems, jump to the conclusion that every complicated system is trivially subject to human control. I had a professor once put it this way: disease is just that -- a dis-ease.
The first thing you have to understand is that no organism lives in a biological vacuum. Every organisms interacts with other organisms. When first two organisms meet, the interaction is usually rather messy. One or the other or both die in great numbers. Gradually, they make adjustments and the deaths decrease. One becomes a disease or parasite of the other. Eventually, the two organisms will reach a détente and begin living as symbionts. Given enough time, the distinction between the two may even vanish (see: endosymbiont hypothesis).
The flu virus is, in particular, a rather striking study of this process. Consider the vast majority of fowl who carry the virus asymptomatically. For them, flu is not a disease, but rather a simple hitch-hiker. For humans, you can predict the severity of a flu outbreak based on how well adjusted the virus is to humans. The more avian characteristics it has, the worse the symptoms and mortality are likely to be. At the same time, an ill adjusted virus is much less likely to spread.
One other thing to consider is that the flu virus itself does not exist in isolation from itself. The Spanish flu of 1918 is an interesting case in this respect. It was, as I alluded to before, ill adjusted to human hosts. At the same time, it was particularly communicable; something of an oddity for a flu with so many avian characteristics. It did kill a large number of people, but within a year or two the major damage had been done and the pandemic was over.
Why? Well, certainly a large portion of the human population that had become exposed but had not died were now immune. More importantly, though, the strain mutated and became better adjusted to human hosts. This strain, H1N1, then became the predominant form of the "seasonal flu". It is likely that you have become infected by a descendent of this very strain, probably many times over.
I would not fear this virus for the same reason that I do not fear Ebola or Marburg virus. Viruses that kill quickly and efficiently do not spread as well as those that cause some disease but allow their host to continue functioning more or less normally (all the while exposing many more to the virus). Of course, this is little comfort to the dead, and there will always be those who die from any outbreak (just go look at the annual death toll from "seasonal flu"). It is far, far from a reason to start predicting the end of humanity.
One final note on the bioweapon/bioterror angle: if you follow the thinking of the people that actually contemplate the use of bioweapons, you'll find that bioweapons are only ever considered as denial-of-area or knock-down agents. That is, you can use a bioweapon to prevent your enemy from gaining or holding a strategic position. What you don't find is anyone proposing to use a bioweapon as a coup de grace. Those that study these things understand that any biological agent has an in-built time limit on its effectiveness.
Edit: I just realized I should mention that while I don't appreciate the sensationalism espoused by the scientific press, H5N1 is a very real, very troubling threat. It won't wipe out the human race, but it does have a good chance of setting humanity back a decade or two (not from disease, but primarily from the knock-on effects of people reacting to the disease, halting productive work and worldwide travel). In my mind, though, this is all the more reason to publish this research and, while we're at it, pour some more money into the worldwide flu monitoring network.
What is the plural of virus?
Viruses. It is not viri, or (worse) virii. True, the word comes directly from Latin, but not all Latin words ending in -us have -i as their plural.
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.html
The plural of virus is neither viri nor virii, nor even vira nor virora. It is quite simply viruses, irrespective of context.
Suffice to say that I don't find "it doesn't fit comfortably in the mouth of an English speaker" to be a good basis on which to form conclusions about how Latin speakers would decline their vocabulary.
I mean, despite being Greek, I don't particularly object to the fact that most of the Greek loanwords in English fail to fully follow Greek grammar when people speak English. For example, phobias rather than phoboi or phobioi has become the accepted plural of phobia. Heck, people don't even decline my name properly when speaking to me, since English doesn't use the vocative case.
Viruses that kill quickly and efficiently do not spread as well as those that cause some disease but allow their host to continue functioning more or less normally (all the while exposing many more to the virus).
While this perspective is sound and less alarming than the source, viruses like influenza can still spread relatively far, can't they? They are believed to be contagious one or two days before the onset of symptoms [1], leaving a quite big window open for contagion.
[1] When is a person with influenza contagious? A person is most likely to pass on the virus during the period beginning one to two days before the onset of symptoms and ending four to five days after the onset. http://www.vaccineinformation.org/flu/qandadis.asp
Ok, now what's your next move? Well, you want to reproduce. Really, that's all you want to do. You don't care if you reproduce in this host or another host, so long as you get the chance to make many, many offspring. The problem is, eventually this host's immune system will catch on and eradicate you. So, you had best make plans to find a new host.
Now you have two choices:
1. You could reproduce rapidly. This will allow you to generate the greatest number of viral particles before the host immune system catches on. Unfortunately, as you reproduce your host will become ill. They will be less mobile and more likely to be quarantined, so you might end up coming in contact with fewer potential new hosts.
2. You could reproduce at a measured pace. You'll end up with fewer offspring total before the immune system knocks you out, but if you can leave your host mostly healthy, then they are more likely to bring you in contact with more potential new hosts.
As for why you are contagious before the onset of symptoms, that is due to another rather interesting feature of the flu. You see, the flu can cause damage in a variety of different ways. Obviously, taking over the machinery of a cell to make new virus particles is not good for the cell or a tissue. However, that's not the most damaging effect that flu can have.
For particularly fatal cases of the flu, what happens is that so many viral particles are produced so rapidly that the body's immune system goes into overdrive. Never underestimate the power of the human immune system, especially the power to kill humans! This is why the Spanish flu, the Swine flu, and H5N1 are most devastating to relatively young, relatively healthy individuals (their immune systems are the strongest).
So, the flu symptoms that result from the body's own immune system causing damage will only occur (obviously) once the immune system has already engaged and begun neutralizing the virus. Hence, this is why flu is typically only communicative before the onset of symptoms.
Edit: I should add that despite this interesting feature of the flu, almost all diseases are primarily communicable before the onset of symptoms. This has as much to do with the immune system as it does with the fact that generalized symptoms won't set in until the buggers have already been reproducing for a while.
It was stupid question, pardon my ignorance, but just a reply with an explanation would suffice.
(edit) Specifically, from NYT article on aging from few days ago - Senescence can also be caused when cells run out of telomeres, the caps at the end of the chromosomes that get shorter at each cell division.
Even as an explanatory analogy, it's best to leave teleological explanations out of descriptions of evolutionary medicine. Your point in your grandparent post (the top comment in this thread) is correct that only actual real-world results can show whether an influenza virus is optimally designed (by human beings) to be both highly contagious and highly virulent. But precisely because that is an empirical question, there is no point to hand-waving arguments that a virus "wants" to reproduce. Viruses don't have volition about anything. Some viruses spread through an entire host population and make the host go extinct. It wouldn't help the future of Homo sapiens if a human-killing virus spread rapidly through humankind.
http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/PatheticFallacy.html
Teleogical explanations (the organism does this because of a desire or drive to survive) are especially common in popular "explanations" of evolution, but they are still errors. Organisms survive or not because of some outcome of their interaction with the inanimate natural world and with other organisms, period. It's perfectly possible for a virus to evolve that kills off its entire host population. (Very likely, that has happened more than once in evolutionary history.) No tendency to survive to reproduce in another generation should be appealed to in order to "explain" why most viruses are not as virulent as theoretically possible. (Lack of virulence of viruses has as much to do with differential survival of hosts as it has to do with differential survival of different strains of viruses.) I'm denying that the claimed general tendency is an invariant feature of all viruses.
1)All organisms are driven towards certain outcomes. Even if driven only towards reproduction.
2)Even an organism "at rest" is actively fighting/"moving" against the direction of entropy.
The core of your issue seems to do with anthropomorphisis not teleology. A lot of people conflate teleology with anthropomorphisis because their first introduction to the idea is through the "watchmaker argument" for a creator.
But... If you're projecting a computational view on biology as many Molecular Biologists now do. You are entertaining a machine that is processing/reasoning about data. Saying that a machine can reason is an anthropomorphic interpretation.
Not all anthropomorphisis is equal. There's a difference between pre-rational anthropomorphisis and isomorphic constructs like entropy, computation, teleological processes, etc...
"As early as the 1980s, researchers started viewing DNA or genomes as the dynamic storage of a language system with precise computable finite states represented as a finite state machine (Searls, 1993). Recent complex systems research has also suggested some far-reaching commonality in the organization of information in problems from biology, computer science, and physics, such as the Bose–Einstein condensate (a special state of matter, Bianconi and A.L. Barabási, 2001)."
The truth is that the complete opposite of what you claim there is what occurred. H1N1 (which I could easily find the numbers for) was most devastating to those with weaker immune systems, as most people would expect.
Age group--specific H1N1-related death rates were 3.5 for persons aged 0--4 years, 1.1 for persons aged 5--24 years, 4.2 for persons aged 25--64 years, and 7.2 for persons aged ≥65 years.[1]
The now known as Spanish flu wasn't Spanish at all [0]. It's believed it was originated in China.
The 'Spanish flu' name came as a result of a mix of circumstances: the early affliction and large mortalities in mid 1918s in Spain (althought a first wave of influenza appeared early in the spring of 1918 in Kansas and in military camps throughout the US) and Spain’s neutral position during World War I. Without Media censorship, hence openly reporting about a flu outbreak, led to fooling observers into thinking that’s where the disease had come from.
[0] http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/
Edit: Formatting
But you also seem to assume that all such interaction are taking place under natural conditions (humans are just a passive agent, one of the mammalian species, like a cow perhaps). In reality though humans are actively manipulating this virus in a laboratory environment and are able to select strains that are deadly enough, but not too deadly, also transmittable enough. That is the real danger I think.
> Why? Well, certainly a large portion of the human population that had become exposed but had not died were now immune.
What if you or your family isn't. Are you willing to brave on a new hardened strain of avian flu just to find out. Would you soldier on with a stoic face? Nobody would right? Therefore the panic. So this is another side of the issue. Humans are going to react to the disease not just in a sort of automatic biological way but in a proactive way. Close borders if they can, quarantine and so on.
> Viruses that kill quickly and efficiently do not spread as well as those that cause some disease but allow their host to continue functioning more or less normally
I think again, you are assuming a naturally evolving environment outside of human activity. With plane travel for example, and ever larger densities of population centers, the same assumptions about the rate of spreading of a virus cannot be made as they would have been 100 years ago. (On the other side there is the pro-active element of having access to quicker and better information, so which one will win -- quick information that could be used to establish quarantine zones for example or the disease carried by fast traveling passengers? But that is a whole other discussion).
> bioweapons are only ever considered as denial-of-area or knock-down agents.
I don't think that angle was assumed as much as some ideological angle of depopulating the planet, by a lone extremist, for example. Here is an example profile: a virologist at some research facility who has strong beliefs about the world reaching a tipping point as far as natural resources are concerned vis-a-vis he accelerating increase in population, becomes obsessed with the idea, that de-population has to take place and they are willing to actively encourage it. They start the process of cultivating a strain of flu. When finished they travel to another continent and try to find ways to spread it.
tom clancy's lawyers called, he said to stop using the plot of "seal team six" in internet-forum posts ;)
I think that was the book that made me stop reading Clancy novels, come to think of it.
If you think that humans are the only organism capable of influencing the behavior and functioning of other organisms, I would recommend you read up on Toxoplasma gondii. This is exactly the sort of "hubris" I was referring to.
Allow me to rephrase your original statement, as you might have worded it in a reply to Newton:
In reality though humans are actively manipulating this ball in throwing it and are able to impart a directionally focused momentum so that the ball flys far, but in a specific direction. Surely you can't expect this ball to obey the same laws as the apple that fell from your tree.
See how ridiculous that sounds? I think because evolution is so closely linked with our identity as free-thinking, free-acting individuals, it is tempting to believe that evolution follows no laws but is rather a reactive system. In reality, you can no more violate the laws of evolution than you can violate the laws of motion. The only difference is that we have a much better understanding of the laws of motion...
I was thinking more of : Here is naturally occurring uranium ore in the environment. Sometimes water would seep through it and start moderating the neutrons enough to cause a self-sustain short term nuclear reaction vs Here is an arsenal of 1000 MIRVed 5MT thermonuclear warheads. Both follow the laws of physics , no question about it, one can wipe us all out pretty much one can make a few villagers sick perhaps.
2. Once you light the fuse of that nuke, we actually know quite a bit about what happens next. If you were to release this virus, we know pretty much nothing about what happens next. Could be bad...but probably not as bad as you would expect.
3. You analogy would be more apt if you had said: "Here is naturally occurring uranium ore. Sometimes it can self-sustain short term nuclear reactions, but sometimes is spontaneously detonates and takes out a 100-mile area." See, that's the problem with the flu. Outbreaks will be bad, very bad, from time to time, but that's all thanks to Mother Nature. Part of the reason is simple numbers: 7bil humans x ?bil birds x ?x10^15 virus particles... What makes you think that humans can do worse?
...but yeah, you're right with one caveat: the success of a disease depends only on how far it spreads. The _most_ successful "diseases" are the multiple viruses who have completely integrated their genomes with the human genome, and so exist in > 7 billion copies on the earth.
Yes, it's true that the virus and host adapted to each other and it's nowhere near as deadly now, but we have a proof of concept of a virus that can do a lot worse than the flu virus in this article, and that's bad enough.
Like parent said, the major danger would be from the economic loss. Scared people won't go to work or to school - sometimes with good reason, and sometimes out of sheer panic. People who don't go to work are people who don't produce much, and if this happens on a large scale it'll be felt.
Maybe the rich, industrialized countries would be able to quarantine it quickly enough, but if it was released in, say, Africa, the governments there wouldn't be able to do much about it. Hygiene is helpful, but it only does so much against airborne pathogens, and even in hospitals where everyone is trained to wash their hands disease is spread all the time. As for vaccines, they take time to develop and deploy. Remember the H1N1 scare in 2009? That vaccine was in short supply at that time.
Quantitatively, the only real data in this thread is that it's possible for a virus to kill ~80% of a population like myxamatosis (oops, it looks like I was wrong - it's more like 95%: http://books.google.com/books?id=wnlB7EMtqFYC&pg=PA427&#... )
It's not obvious how much of a difference the factors you mention make. They could nip the virus in the bud so it only kills a handful of people, or they could make virtually no difference at all.
You say that like it is so easy. H1N1 spread all around the world despite the best efforts in all those areas.
EDIT: Also about quarantine the same thing applies. Students and co-workers are encouraged NOT to come to work/school if sick but a lot do anyways, simply because at least in school it's easy to fall behind if you miss a couple lectures.
I think you are forgetting about the fundamentalist nuts who are hoping for the end of the world. I am sure they would see it as their destiny if they could get a hold of such bioweapons and start their own version of Armageddon.
Of course, fundamentalist nuts may not be capable of realizing that, but those of us living in reality have rather less to worry about.
I disagree with that argument. Its almost right, but I think its perniciously wrong.
Its true that the most dangerous viruses, all other things being equal, are the ones with longer incubation time. Outbreaks of Ebola have tended to wipe out an isolated population, and quickly 'burn themselves out'; this has substantially reduced their threat.
But that 'all other things being equal' part is important. There's nothing that says a virus that kills quickly and efficiently can't also spread well.
You could have a flu virus, with 50% mortality, that is asymptotic for 5 days, and then kills quickly; but if that virus easily transfers airborne, it could still spread well. The question is always whether each infected person can infect - on average - a little more than one other person; there's no reason a highly contagious flu couldn't do this in a 5 day window, and that makes it very scary.
In simple epidemic modeling terms, you've got a contagion rate Beta, and a recovery rate Gamma. With fixed Beta, lower Gamma causes more spreading. But even with a fairly high recovery rate, if Beta is high enough, the disease will spread effectively.
If humanity should fear anything, its viruses like these. Its way above nuclear meltdowns, or climate change, in that respect.
>One final note on the bioweapon/bioterror angle: if you follow the thinking of the people that actually contemplate the use of bioweapons, you'll find that bioweapons are only ever considered as denial-of-area or knock-down agents.
Have you ever heard of these guys? : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo These crazy bastards did a sarin attack on the Tokyo subway. Wiki says: "Over the next week, the full scale of Aum's activities was revealed for the first time. At the cult's headquarters in Kamikuishiki on the foot of Mount Fuji, police found explosives, chemical weapons and biological warfare agents, such as anthrax and Ebola cultures, and a Russian Mil Mi-17 military helicopter. The Ebola virus was delivered from Zaire in 1994"
I don't know how well sourced that wikipedia article is, but I've certainly read many places that they sent people to source Ebola in Africa.
These were not logical people, rationally planning military use scenarios, and weren't thinking about things like 'denial-of-area'. There aren't many people like that in the world, but there's some.
>It won't wipe out the human race, but it does have a good chance of setting humanity back a decade or two
3 billion deaths would be an unprecedented human tragedy. Its like flipping a coin, for each of your loved ones lives, if you want to personalise it. Its completely horrific, and we shouldn't lose sight of that, talking about 'being set back a decade or two'.
Furthermore, you'd probably be talking about complete social, economic, societal collapse. I'd imagine that would be very hard to recover from.
The prospect of something like this getting out is terrifying. I'm a researcher, and I really think we should be pushing forward scientific progress. But even the fact that there's a virus like this sitting in a lab somewhere is scary. I hope its got an extremely high level of security. What happens if a crazy group kidnaps one of the researcher's families? I definitely understand why there's concern about making the 'steps to reproduce' available.
Several years ago, Bill Joy talked about having to censor certain intellectual information, for situations just such as this. I thought he was a bit crazy at the time; but with developments like this, well, maybe there's an uncomfortable discussion to be had, here; personally, I need to think more about this.
> In my mind, though, this is all the more reason to publish this research and, while we're at it, pour some more money into the worldwide flu monitoring network.
Flu monitoring is probably not going to stop something like this if it appears in the wild - at least in terms of intervening to quarantine a particular variant.
If you look at the swine flu outbreak, in the early stages they were worried that the mortality was high (they didn't have good data). But no attempt at containment was made; the time window for containment was effectively gone, by the time the virus came to our attention. (I can't find a source for this, but that's my recollection). (EDIT: Here's one source: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/07/...)
I attended a talk a couple of years ago: http://netsci2010.net/abstracts/Bajardi.htm
That group has what seems to be one of the best global epidemic models; the point of the talk was that even shutting down air travel was very unlikely to stop the spread of the flu they were studying, in response to detecting an outbreak; its just very hard to stop these things spreading.
I should say - I'm not an expert on biological epidemiology or anything, and I'd love to be told I'm wrong about any of this.
> There's nothing that says a virus that kills quickly and efficiently can't also spread well.
There is, though. The fitness of a virus is reflected in its ability to reproduce and spread. The ability of a virus to kill is not a positive for fitness, and over the long run is in fact a negative evolutionary influence. After all, if you leave your host alive, you then have the chance to mutate just enough to avoid detection by the immune system and re-infect the same host (hello seasonal flu!). If you killed the host the first time...whoops!
This won't kill 3 billion. If it kills in excess of 100 million I would be completely shocked. I suspect the world would go full "madagascar" ("shut...down...everything!") if deaths reached more than 10 million.
And that's the real problem, isn't it? H5N1 is deadly, sure. But, much as the human immune system overreacting to an infection is the most common cause of death by H5N1, humanity's overreaction to a pandemic will likely be far more damaging than the pandemic itself.
Yes, in naturally occurring viii who's development is controlled by natural selection.
However there is no absolute genetic impediment to having a virus that is both easily spread (contagious with a medium length incubation time), and deadly (kills host immediately after incubation). Human beings could engineer that virus in the same way we engineered mice that glow in the dark.
Oh, and those mice that glow in the dark might look cool in the lab, but they'd be the first to get eaten in the wild. There's a reason mice don't naturally glow in the dark...
However, in the wild given no antibiotics the non-antibiotic strains will outcompete them.
More importantly, you can limit your infection from anything by simply limiting contact. The old "shut down everything" which can contain even a highly infectious virus that's hit a huge chunk of the population aka 5+%. This might not prevent infection but it slows down the spread enough that evolutionary pressure is going to start to push up incubation periods etc.
I think the Keynes quote is, for once, appropriate here: "In the long run, we are all dead."
Your argument seems to be that as a virus with a longer incubation is fitter, that if someone released the virus in the article, it would quickly mutate into this 'fitter', less lethal version.
I think you misunderstand the evolutionary process. I suspect that if the virus was released, because it is already so contagious, it could infect most of us within 10s of human-to-human transmission generations (especially if any of the early spreaders had a large number of contacts, or was well connected).
In that scenario, there's not going to be sufficient generations for the evolutionary adaptation to manifest. (10s of human-to-human generations is vastly more virus copying generations; this doesn't matter, as the evolutionary effect in favor of less lethality occurs at a human level).
So, your argument would make sense to me, if we were considering the chances of a virus like this one naturally occurring; but that's not what the article is about.
>I suspect the world would go full "madagascar" ("shut...down...everything!") if deaths reached more than 10 million.
Epidemics tend to either burn out, or grow exponentially. Exponential growth has strange consequences.
For something like an airborne and highly contagious flu, by the time 10 million people have died, it is way too late for any containment; at that stage maybe 1B are already infected. Even by the time even 10,000 people have died, I would guess its too late for containment.
We live in a very 'small world' these days, and that really changes this sort of discussion.
On the contrary, I think you are misunderstanding the evolutionary process. Why do you think it was possible to evolve this new transmissibility in only 10 or so passages in ferrets? Influenza mutates and adapts with breathtaking rapidity (another thing which makes it very interesting to study, and hard to combat).
Also, selection can happen within a single individual. As soon as an infection gets inside of a cell, variety begins arising. The immune system then begins its battle, and it becomes a numbers game. The varieties which reproduce more rapidly will also be targeted first. If a different variety inside the same host can fly under the radar by reproducing at a more measured pace, it will gradually win out within that host.
What do you think of homeopathy? It's supposed to work best for infectious diseases at controlling symptoms: cutting back an overreaction.
The argument homeopaths make is that bacteria would otherwise populate within an overreacted tissue, leading to further overreaction (the body creates its own symptoms: dis-ease) and they also say the body is full of bacteria/pathogens anyhow yet homeostasis can still be found.
http://lesmondine.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/homeopathy-theres...
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/11/measuring_contamin...
http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/homeo.html
Add: if a doctor said you only had 5 months to live, you'd probably start doing all these things you'd never got around to doing, or thought you could do, the bucket list - then in 5 months when you're still around, you realize it may have been a lie, but your depression has lifted and you have a new lease on life: that's what I think homeopathy is supposed to be: tiny signals on certain levers, accepted as true, leading to massive effects.
In my experience, homeopathic remedies are very powerful and absolutely do work in evoking a reaction, but in terms of curing illness, it becomes more difficult to work out the remedy and dosage: and within such difficulty a skepticism is born.
According to my research, homepathic remedies often contain no molecules of the source substance.
If you were to become infected, the first route for attack would be neuraminidase inhibitors. There are two widely available kinds of these drugs, and so far they have proven mostly effective against H5N1. There is the possibility for resistance to develop, but so far they do work. If they prove to not work, then (and I am not a doctor, so don't quote me) I imagine the recommended treatment would be high-dose steroids coupled with antibiotics. This is the generic treatment for problematic inflammation. If this treatment proved insufficient, then as a last resort you might try immune-suppressive therapies, but as far as I know that route is largely untested in the field.
The bigger point, though, is that modern medicine has many tools in its toolbox, and homeopathy is definitely not one of them. It has never been proven to have any real effect in any sort of rigorous trial. In contrast, all of the other items I listed above (vaccine, neuraminidase inhibitor, steroid, immune-suppressive) have all been extensively tested and verified to be effective.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22087613
"A simple description is provided of the process of potentization in homeopathic dilutions. With the exception of minor details, this simple model replicates the results previously obtained from a more complex model. While excited states are short lived in isolated molecules, they become long lived in nanodomains that form coherent cooperative aggregates controlled by the geomagnetic field. These domains either slowly emit biophotons or perform specific biochemical work at their target." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22073975
"Though often criticised, many experiments with remedies diluted beyond Avogadro's number demonstrate specific effects." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22073975
WOW - seems to be a lot of evidence to support homeopathy, too bad it's not well known (or rather denied/suppressed through fear!)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21962203
I mean, I regularly publish "The Journal of Cryptozoology and Mythical Beasts I Wish Were Real", but that doesn't really mean anything...
Add: Google CSE on those publications http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=007606573058381115019%3A5j... but the container implies the content..
The relevant portion:
> For the special class of ergodic systems, the time average is the same for almost all initial points: statistically speaking, the system that evolves for a long time "forgets" its initial state.
Water, at room temperature, is a member of this special class of ergodic systems. In that sentence, "statistically speaking" refers to the fact that we describe water on a molecular scale as a statistical system (it does not mean that sometimes the system remembers). Also, "a long time" in statistical mechanics is taken as a time period much greater than the average time it takes for any two random water molecules to collide...in other words: "a long time" == nanoseconds.
By the ergodic theorem, once you remove a molecule from water, it forgets that molecule was ever present within nanoseconds. There is nothing in the spatial organization, the molecular translations, or any of the modes of vibration that would give you any clue that molecule had been present. In essence, the information of that molecules presence is erased. We call this entropy.
Ergodic theory is a mathematical theory that is key in describing systems in statistical mechanics. This is not a question of better scientific instruments. You would need to invalidate 100+ years of scientific knowledge for homeopathy to work as advertised.
Edit: In all fairness, I guess I should clarify the "statistically speaking" bit. Technically, there is a non-zero probability that some bit of water will "remember" a molecule that was previously disolved in it. The nice thing about statistical mechanics is that it allows you to calculate exactly how frequently this would be expected to occur. The answer is that you would expect a volume of 1ml of water to "remember" for at least 1 second somewhere in the universe less than once...not once per minute or once per hour, but once per the lifetime of the universe. So, yeah, homeopathy is complete BS.
I am happy discuss this off-site.. I don't think it'd progress much further though.
You minimize something that is not natural (engineered to be lethal) that could kill several billion people. I wouldn't stand up there lecturing anyone about hubris.
Todd Rider from MIT may already have the answer to this problem. What I'd like to know is, if the natural or unnatural mutation of this virus is such an immediate threat, why not rush his DRACO to market for emergency use? Why do we have to sit here and pretend that some problems can't be solved, when someone has apparently done just that?
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=qubTdDk1H3IC&pg=PA205... : "fatality rates of 80–90% in Native American populations during smallpox epidemics"
Can someone more qualified than me comment on this? I was under the impression that this is as ridiculous as saying that you started out with dogs and ended up with cats 10 generations later. That viruses belong to specific families, and those families include how they're transmitted.
My knowledge of this field is extremely limited; can someone please clear up my confusion? :)
http://www.nih.gov/news/health/jul2010/niaid-15.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/feb/06/flu-universal-...
is going on in multiple countries, with some major funding support. Antiviral medicines that treat cases of the flu tend to be in short supply in every flu season, but some governments have taken care to stockpile those in ways that ensure that essential services would go on in those countries even during a severe flu pandemic. Further research on broad-spectrum flu vaccines, including a possible universal vaccine, is warranted to prevent natural strains of the flu and is ongoing. Further research, development, and production of antiviral medicines to treat people who catch the flu is also warranted and ongoing.
A new pandemic, from whatever source, would be extremely disruptive, but as an astute previous comment pointed out, people can do things like self-quarantine, and such simple forms of self-protection were very effective in stopping the SARS epidemic in 2003. Predicting the death of half of humankind based the preliminary finding reported in the rather sensational story submitted here is not a prediction I believe or worry about.
How would we stop all the permutations of this?
Why do we lack the capacity? Because there's no profit in making flu vaccines! Gotta love capitalism, eh?
Edit: I did find this article which mentions new vaccines being more profitable (http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2009/tc200...), so perhaps the market is not as bleak as I had thought. Still, I worry about things as vital as vaccine and antibiotic manufacture being left to the whims of the market (new antibiotics are, last I checked, still not profitable).
While we're fretting about whether this will get out of a lab, it's not entirely unlikely that a similar strain will evolve in the wild (now you know why they burned all those chickens in China).
Edit: "A genetic study showed that the new, dangerous strain had only five mutations compared to the original one, and all of them were earlier seen in the natural environment – just not all at once."
It helps that just like it's not actually possible to start a fire that would actually incinerate half the globe, it's not actually possible to create a virus that would wipe out half of humanity. The article is wrong and sensationalist.
But, seriously, isn't it obvious that publication of the fact that this research is blocked is already enough for terrorists? From the preliminary report they already have an outline of what needs to be done, they know where to go and who to ask or what to steal if they can't do it themselves.
How you decide who should have access to this information is now the problem. If they are not careful, the censoring could piss of some crazy scientist who would now announce such discoveries with a blogpost and allow anyone have access to it than through a sort of regulated process that would at least give the 'right people' a lead on the info; so they can start working on an anti-dote before is gets to the mass market.
As to what kind of research should be allowed, I have no comment.
Our capacity for mass destruction is only going to get worse. I think it's far more efficacious to look toward managing that reality than to try to postpone or prevent it.
I vote for taking it out of the hands of people and debugging Skynet for longer than they did in the movie. Then stop competing and enjoy the flowers.
Watch "Colossus: The Forbin Project".
That said, I can't see Science (the magazine) being mentioned in the article anywhere - unless the "Science" in "Science Insider" and "US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity" refers to the magazine.
But anyway, published or not "bio terrorists" are not the kind of people the article wants you to picture. The only likely way such an attack could be carried out would be with massive support of some unfriendly government.
There's no bio-weapon Al Quaeda working group or anything like that and if there were the worst they could do is try to infect us by releasing some infected animal loose somewhere in the hopes it would infect someone.
I wish this post didn't have "fluff piece" written all over it and focused in a far more detailed way about the merits of publishing scientific studies that could be used for nefarious purposes. Unfortunately, the post gives us so little facts on that subject that none of us could really build a good argument for or against it without doing a fair amount of research first or resorting to uneducated guesses and opinions. It's too bad, really.
You're aware that Aum Shinrikyo released aerosolised anthrax spores for a week in Japan before they stopped, and that it's only because they used the wrong anthrax that there wasn't widespread infection?
That was in 1993; I imagine it's technologically much easier and cheaper to do it now, but that there are tighter controls over chemicals etc.
The article is sensationalist. Bio-terrorists don't need to kill anyone, they just need to cause economic harm. They can do this by releasing blue-tongue or foot&mouth or whatever in a few farms. That costs billions and long lasting damage.
The issue here is creating this strain, sure some crazy death cult would use a weaponized flu, but the OP is arguing they wouldn't be able to create it in the first place.
They aerosolised the spores, and released them for over a week. That's not as simple as putting powder in an envelope and putting it in the mail.
(http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/281/18/1735.full)
> Most experts concur that the manufacture of a lethal anthrax aerosol is beyond the capacity of individuals or groups without access to advanced biotechnology. However, autonomous groups with substantial funding and contacts may be able to acquire the required materials for a successful attack. One terrorist group, Aum Shinrikyo, responsible for the release of sarin in a Tokyo, Japan, subway station in 1995,6 dispersed aerosols of anthrax and botulism throughout Tokyo on at least 8 occasions. For unclear reasons, the attacks failed to produce illness.
> * the OP is arguing they wouldn't be able to create it in the first place.*
The point I'm responding to is this:-
>The only likely way such an attack could be carried out would be with massive support of some unfriendly government.
I disagree that "massive support of some unfriendly government" is needed; the example I give is Aum Shinrikyo weaponising anthrax spores (albeit the wrong anthrax spores.) AS successfully recruited undergraduates and graduates; getting access to suitably stocked labs wouldn't be that hard for them.
They didn't make a lethal anthrax aerosol, they used a completely harmless vaccine strain of anthrax, I would say that classifies them as amateurs.
If it really required vast bioengineering expertise to make an anthrax aerosol, one would think they wouldn't make such a ridiculous mistake.
As to using the wrong anthrax - Identifying anthrax is hard.
PDF: (http://jcm.asm.org/content/39/12/4566.full.pdf)
>Strain identification in Bacillus anthracis has been problematic due to a lack of distinguishing features, both phenotypic and molecular (1). With the identification of variable-number tandem repeats (VNTRs), identification of strains (unique genotypes) by multiple-locus VNTR analysis (MLVA) is now possible, and worldwide clone-based diversity patterns have been demonstrated (2). The VNTR loci are hypervariable and have multiple allelic states that provide high discrimination capacity for differentiating among strains and for identifying evolutionary relationships.
That's from 2001. Aum Shinrikyo incident was in 1993.
Remember these people don't think dying is bad - they usually believe in an afterlife.
I don't understand why terrorists shouldn't be capable of doing such a thing.
Maybe the rationale is that they wouldn't be able to set up sterile lab environments, because we all know that terrorists live in dirty third world countries without hygiene?
I mean; why bother with a future that does not exist yet? If it gets out and holds to be genuine information then some fascist group (sect, terrorists, whoever) develops it and releases it into the wild... What will happen? WE DON'T KNOW. It could kill half of humanity but also only a few people, we can't say.
All we know for sure is that there may be hugely harmful virus data in some lab. That's all there is to say, future will tell what's gonna happen. Why bother with a future we can't predict?
Hell, I'm not so sure that any virologist or two worth their salt might not be able to do the same. Modified-Nature you scary!
Ironically the TSA could be the ones to spread a virus from person to person because I am sure they do not change gloves on every grope?
The relevant buzzword is full disclosure. Even I'm not sure if you can take that so far, but I'm pretty sure that if this is released, nobody ever gets to complain about someone publishing an exploit for their personal project, because that's nothing in comparison.