100% Fatal, Vaccine-Proof Pox?
Dean
I have stuck this back at the top of the Dean's World rotation, because I think the entire discussion, comments and all, needs greater exposure. --Dean
But it gets worse. The recent articles on it (see below) led me to this story from late 2003.
Read it carefully and follow the logic: they were trying to modify a virus, a variant of smallpox that only infects mice, that could not be vaccinated against. They succeeded. The purpose was to devise a vaccine-proof virus, so they could learn how to kill such a virus. But it was also supposed to be a minor pathogen, typically causing sterility. Instead it was 100% fatal.
So with only minor alteration they created a virus that was 100% fatal and could not be inoculated against. In a lab in St. Louis. On a presumably smallish government grant.
You know, I'm normally of the "information should be free" mindset, but... how f&!#ing irresponsible of it was them to simply publish how they did this, or even that this was possible?
Who wants to be the first to step up and say they couldn't do this with actual smallpox, in humans? And who wants to be the first to step up and say no one ever would do it? Especially if over the next 10-20 years the technology to do this kind of genetic manipulation on viruses may be something that your average grad student could afford?
What are the odds of someone like a Ted Kaczynski just randomly playing with human pathogens, just to see what he could do with them?
Related Posts (on one page):
- More On Moore's Law
- 100% Fatal, Vaccine-Proof Pox?
- Moore's Law
- More On Radical Evolution
- Radical Evolution
What are the odds of someone like a Ted Kaczynski just randomly playing with human pathogens, just to see what he could do with them?
Damn, reminds me of a short story I wrote 20 years ago... entitled And Usher in These Latter Days. The science in my story is no doubt thoroughly bogus, but the basic premise is all too real a possibility.
Cold comfort...
And the Then and Now was good too.
One setting I've done has a Russian scientist selling off a smallpox sample to a would-be suicide bomber turned smallpox martyr who visits a convention city, and wanders about.
I am losing my mind. There is an article by Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy out there about this topic and they agree with Dean. (Dean agrees with them?) I can't for the life of my remember where I saw it though ...
I recall from history books, that millions of people were repopulated, dislocated, and emaciated from lack of food, due both to the apocalyptic destruction in Europe as well as those vicious naval blockades.
It seems to me that that is the exact type of chaos and disorder where a flu bug can cause maximum damage. It suggests to me, that the bug itself, per se, was not some super-duper virulent strain, but merely oppotunistically benefitted from an unusual circumstance where millions of war-torn populations were at their highest risk of suspectibility.
It also suggests to me, that this identical bug could not do anything close to that damage if it were introduced to a healthy, thriving, well-fed population today.
No arguments, here, just my own personal speculations.
Barnes, Hank
Very responsible, in my opionion.
That this is possible is (probably) not a genuine secret in the profession. If so then it's possible this thing could be churned out and unleashed with no warning.
This was the layman at least a chance at knowing what is going on.
Someone's on the bathroom floor, doing her cocaine,
Someone's got his finger on the button in some room,
No one can convince me we aren't gluttons for our doom..."
I doubt that in practice any virus would be 100% fatal, but obviously 99.94% mortality is only OK if you're Stephen King and want to write a really long book.
Certainly the effects of the war, the proximity of troops to one another in the trenches, etc. Played a role in the transmission and devastation caused by the virus. But the virus is a particularly deadly form of influenza.
Tests were done substituting the genes from this virus into less virulent forms of influenza. They showed that certain genes from this virus made other influenzas more deadly and that this particular viral genome in it's entirety was more lethal than recombinant viruses that contained 7/8 genes from the 1918 flu.
Not happy mind you but it beats the snot out of being dead.
It also suggests to me, that this identical bug could not do anything close to that damage if it were introduced to a healthy, thriving, well-fed population today.
I'm only a layman on this topic but I suspect that with excepions the West would be okay. Higher than usual mortality, sure but not that much - we're well setup to handle plague with an educated population and an cultural bias to order.
Yes, we can be orderly when it counts. Watch people queue up at McDonalds at lunch time if you don't believe me.
It's those parts of the world that don't practice basic sanitation or let hoodoo trump common sense that are going to be depopulated. This prospect does not fill me with glee; you think those parts of the world have problems now ...
That said, look at the pathogenicity of the bugs being talked about here. I work in a building with over 300 people in it. My son goes to a school every day with a few hundred kids. How would you "educate" us to avoid getting sick from an airborne virus? Never touch anybody, or anything anybody else touches, wash hands up to the elbows several times a day at least, and wear a mask at all times? Start working and schooling entirely from home?
I doubt it. I don't think a vaccine was developed in 1918 to stop this flu -- which means that people naturally developed anti-bodies (like we do with chicken pox) to beat it.
Trying to reconstruct deadly viruses from 87 years smacks of the same "scaremongering" we discussed in other threads before.
But, again, it's difficult to form solid opinions on historical/medical matters -- so I remain agnostic.
Myself, NO, I still ain't afraid of the flu, and won't be getting a flu shot for the, oh, 49th consecutive year.
Barnes, Hank
p.s. Good cite to Science, but I like to read the whole article, not just the abstract, and was unable to do so. Maybe, I'll order it.
The virus is definitely exceptionally virulent. You can read the papers in Science or Nature.
Would it be as deadly today? No, better medicine,... Many people would be resistant because of antibodies to similar influenzas we have been exposed to...
But I think the larger point that Dean brings up is a good one and something that's important to discuss. In a world where genetic technology is becoming more and more accessible can we really put the genomic information out on the internet for anyone who wants to download it for some of the most deadly diseases we have ever faced? And should we distribute the very instructions for how to build your own virus from scratch?
It just doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
Linux is demonstrably more secure than Windows. Seriously--it is, no question about it. One line of argument is that it's not used as much so it's not as vulnerable but that's baloney: literally millions of Linux servers are sitting out there on the internet, vulnerable to any attack a hacker might sling at them. And further, the source code to Linux is fully available, which means anyone who wants to penetrate a Linux server can get full documentation on literally *all* the inner workings and *every* vulnerability, fully documented.
But the result is that any time a vulnerability is spotted, Linux geeks publish it, broadcast it far and wide, and in short order a fix is created. Indeed, it is common for a vulnerabilit to be idnetified and for the fix to be announced at the same time as the vulnerability, because whoever finds it works on it a few hours and comes up with a solution, announcing both at the same time (and getting major credibility for themselves for doing it).
Still, how many people would die of a casually engineered virus before a fix was found? This seems to point to a need for a new paragidm in pathogen research, one which emphasizes more rapid publishing and more open research.
We're not - I think - talking about a virus that comes in and settles down with the population and gets all cozy like chicken pox but one that comes on like a high, hot wind, burns people down and then evolves into a form that isn't so deadly, for it's own survival. It's only deadly (a pandemic) for 12 - 18 months.
So, yah educate. You're sick, even the sniffles, stay home. Wear gloves and surgical masks in public - at least when you're in a store. Use surgical gloves at the gas pump and throw them away. Use pay-at-the-pump to minimize contact.
Quarantine means exactly that - no cute dodges to get out of the house. Precautions for handling the diseased and dead must be cast iron; if your faith forbids a certain practice in handling the dead well that's too damned bad - if we need to burn them to a crisp or a mass grave on the edge of town with a plain marker of names then that is what will happen.
Schools may well shut down in a pandemic - it would be well advised; the little buggers are resivoirs and vectgors of germs. So? It's only for a year or so. We're bright enough as a culture to survive a pandemic with our values intact if we keep our heads about us.
And if you don't think there's anybody who'd really do that, just check out these guys. And while they may eschew violence of any kind, we can't afford to assume there isn't just one among them who's a bright grad student. Especially possibly a charismatic one like Charlie Manson, or worse, the leader of the Heaven's Gate cult.
This is not to say we need to panic. But damn, we need to be thinking about this. As a people. As a society.
However, I also think that there are people out there who are serious.
Let me note I've just read "Old Twentieth" by Haldeman which has a war between augments and normals as backstory. Not a terribly fun book, nor a particularly easy to like viewpoint character. I'm not that impressed, but he did make at least a couple good points.
Of course, he also made me want to kill off teh elite before they do it to me via a virus attack. It does point out the problem of the transnational elites division from the rest of the population.
But I think the end result of being in the .96% would be total economic collapse. You'd be able to go loot food supplies for a decade, and be able to have all sorts of antiques you looted in your house, but you would not be able to keep things going.
.96% even if the most talented part would not keep the world's economy moving. So its back to oh, the seventeenth century or so, I'd guess for teh survivors.
Eric
Now, the "Spanish Lady" was just that because Spain wan't an aggressor and admited she was battling it. Tracing the death tolls around the world, one ends up in China about a decade earlier. There has so far, to my knowledge, not been an epicenter located, but it looks like the Chinese peasent is to blame for that virulent Influenza strain. It's also, last I checked, believed to have jumped species much like the Bird Flu is being treated.
As the millions killed in the US from it didn't have "SPANISH LADY" or even INFULENZA written on their death certificates, the true body count in the US is unknown, and will probably never be known. Same for Europe and Asia.
One would assume that if you could locate an actual victim, you may be able to extract the DNA of the Spanish Lady and use it to study...and then weponize if so desired. I personally don't think that would be a great threat, considering that the Spanish Lady granted immunity to some, and that should give their offspring a fighting chance against it. Just my assumptions though, I'm not a biogeneticist or a viral scientist. However, there have been some amasing advances in studying the Black Death in England...and how it's survivors gave genetic code to their children that even today can be traced and is surviving largely intact. One would assume the same could be said of Spanish Lady...
I do agree with Dean though. This is something everyone needs to think about. Personally, I don't trust the government to do what needs doing in that situation. It would fall to each person, and I'd do my damdest to avoid a "Captain Tripps" situation. I favor cremation for myself anyway, so torchin' bodies don't bother me. Mass pits do, if only because the bodies don't get recorded properly...geneaologist that I pretend to be, records of deaths and burial are important to me.
So a 100% lethal virus is very impressive, but not necessarily a bigger deal than the problems we already have.
But I think a plague in my lifetime is inevitable. This is one reason I don't live in a major city.
I don't really have a clue, obviously, but at least in nature those viruses which are extremely lethal tend not to be terribly transmissible, like rabies, and those that are easily transmissible tend not to be as lethal. I actually don't doubt that it would be possible to create a virus which would be 100% lethal if injected into each host (which is what I assume they were doing to the mice) but I'm not sure I believe it'd be possible to create a virus which would be as transmissible as the flu or smallpox which would also be 100% fatal. I kind of figure if it were easy to do, we'd see it in nature occasionally. This kind of behavior would be a huge mistake in viral survival terms, but it seems like it'd happen accidentally now and and then.
But as this is all speculative and I'm talking through my posterior, anyone's guess is as reasonable as mine. I think we've already thoroughly established there's not a virologist in the house.
Point taken - I'd forgotten we were talking about an engineered virus and was going on about a pandemic.
If it is possible to engineer 100% mortality, then education and information dissemination becomes more important. 100% mortality simply means you catch it and you'll die. The trick will be to avoid catching it - and to keep the thing from spreading.
This might be hard to do - but it will be needfull to do the hard things to keep our society running.
I think that you mean natural viruses generally do not immediately kill even close to 100% of their hosts.
Why shouldn't a virus be nearly 100% fatal as long as it allows enough time for the host to transmit it to other targets and the host species reproduces as quickly or more quickly than transmission rates? This is probably the case with HPV which is the most comman cause of cervical cancer. While cervical cancer almost invariably metasticizes and kills the patient if not treated in its early stages, its incubation is certainly long enough that the patient can have one or more children and pass on HPV to all of her partners.
1. One speculation on the 1918 flu is that the trenches— with their muggy, muddy conditions and horrible sanitation— were a partial breeding ground for the virus. As with many flus, it was the intersection of strains that caused the pandemic: bird flu virus gets into pig amd makes the jump from human to human. Chances are that the war increased the situations that make such zoological jumps possible.
2. Yes, the survivors of the flu developed resistance. When you get "the flu" is is actually a variant from the last time you got it; there are these little markers called antigens that differentiate one flu virus from another. If it's a small shift, such as from an H5N2 to an H5N4, then it's just this year's flu because when you got H5N2 you developed antibodies which give you a partial immunity.
If it's a major antigen shift, such as an H5 to an H9, you're in serious trouble because you have no resistance at all. (I am not sure if the Spanish Influenza also had other differences than antigen shifting; I do know that unlike most other flus it hit twenty-somethings the hardest.) I don't know if flu immunites are passed on more or less than other immunities (you get a certain amount of protection from your mother when you're born.)
3. Turns out that the "stomach flu" isn't a misnomer. The kids who get it do in fact have the flu. It just makes them nauseated as well as congested and feverish. Most adults outgrow this, except in extreme cases (I remember one particular summer camp epidemic that I gratefully escaped; half the staff was down and making offerings to the porcelain god.)
4. 100% mortality is, as noted above, less scary than 50% mortality. Scary as Ebola is, we don't have hemmoraging epidemics because its mortality rate is too high for an easy spread throughout the populace.
Arg, ow, ow. No. It is a misnomer. You're incorrect. Please do not perpetuate this misconception.
It's true that children who get influenza sometimes get nauseated; it is not true that the kind of gastrointestinal episode which people refer to as 'the stomach flu' is influenza. The kind of half-the-camp-is-barfing episode you describe is NOT influenza. It was probably a norovirus, the cause of the cruise ship problems in recent years.
The conflation of influenza and the stomach flu drives me crazy, partly because I'm an annoying pedant and partly because it leads people to believe that their flu shot 'didn't work' if they get a stomach bug.
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease.htm
http://www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/flu.htm