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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

HTML version: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2672.2010....

In case it's not clear why this is on HN's front page, there are simultaneous outbreaks of Ebola and Marburg in Africa right now; this paper discusses their ability to live on surfaces, something not widely understood in the current Ebola outbreak but with huge implications.

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Has the original link been censored? Or did the submitter have special access and not realize it?

Even the abstract is probably something TLAs don't want widely disseminated given the easy access to these viruses that is possible right now. They're poor choices for weapons (you can't stop em), but there are crazy people out there.

I don't think it was censored, I think the link must have expired. You can get the PDF that I initially linked by clicking Get PDF in the above URL.

Mods please replace the broken original link with cryptoz's.

When the paper talks about dissemination via aerosol, that means small droplets of saliva or other bodily fluid ejected into the air. This isn't a howto for insane terrorists to put Ebola into hairspray canisters :)

Ignorance is not what protects humanity from those crazy people. Overwhelmingly, we are kept safe by the moral sense of people. No amount of laws or control has ever proven effective at preventing crazy people from wreaking havoc on large numbers of people. There simply is no one out there who is waiting to find a virus that can be easily spread and have fatal effects who is both capable of enacting such a plan or able to persuade those who are capable to do so. The closest we have is in our militaries, who plan these things and convince themselves of bogeymen hiding around every corner, but even they often find themselves stopped by the moral sense of individuals. We should have been annihilated in a large nuclear war in the 1980s a couple times if not for the individual soldiers simply being unwilling to follow protocol and be responsible for the deaths of millions.

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