Why Do Pathogen Researchers Face Less Scrutiny Than Nuclear Scientists? 227
Lasrick writes "Derrin Culp of the National Center for Disease Preparedness explores the different levels of scrutiny that scientists in microbiology undergo, when compared to those who work in the nuclear weapons field. His complaint is that, even though America's most notorious biosecurity breach — the 2001 anthrax mailings — was the work of an insider, expert panels have concluded that there is no need for intrusive monitoring of microbiologists engaged in unclassified research."
O'rly? (Score:2)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/washington/02anthrax.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 [nytimes.com]
Seems like biowarfare researchers make just as solid scapegoats as crazy nuclear physicists and MIT computer nerds.
Wired had a good article on Anthrax (Score:2)
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Everyone should be intrusively monitored (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember 9/11 folks. That happened because the government didn't have the proper tools to monitor the terrorists before the act occurred mainly due to the idiotic beliefs in an outdated and itself a terroristic document, the constitution. Now that we are moving away from the constitution, which was a piece of crap anyways, the country can be made secure. We now have a solid globalist President that is on board with the abolition of the constitution, especially the second amendment, which will lead us to a socialist global society. It's time to give up your so called 'rights' and get with the program. FORWARD!
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I would like you to back up the statements that Obama is on board with 1) "abolishing the constitution, especially the 2nd amendment," and 2) "which will lead us to a socialist global society."
1) Placing limits on the 2nd amendment isn't abolishing it. Every other amendment from the Bill of Rights has limits that have progressively become more well defined over the last 220 years. The 1st amendment guarantees freedom of speech, yet defamation is illegal. Obama isn't taking your guns. He's saying that we sho
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Did you know that there were standard issue WW2 individual weapons that used 15 round magazines? And 30 round magazines? And 50 round magazines?
Didn't think so.
Which parts of "shall not be infringed" do you have a hard time with?
Note that the First
Open access leads to better outcomes (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Biological agents are readily available. ;-)
2. Biological agents are naturally dangerous ie H5N1 is killing people.
3. Reseach into these agents will provide positive outcomes. ie vaccines
4. Stupid measures such as profiles fail the best researchers, eg NSA fails more than 50% of maths researchers. Those creative left handed types are dangerous. It's actually true that NSA employs fewer left handed people than the research community at large and is an acknowledged problem.
5. Research doesn't have many resources, wasting them upon dumb controls means much less reseach.
6 The military has oodles of cash (read wasteful) however they're not allowed to play with biological weapons so biology doesn't get much of this cash. (unlike nukes)
Hmm (Score:2)
In the past seventy odd years or so, how many nuclear scientists / chemists / biologists / etc. have gone awol?
There's your answer.
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And there's a very good reason for that! A nuclear scientist who defects may justify his or her actions as giving a small country leverage against a bigger one's economic clout. No nukes need to be fired; it's just that (for example) India can't threaten Pakistan with nukes. It's a completely peaceful transfer of power, making it a guilt-free action on the part of the defector.
With biological weapons, the most dangerous ones are already out there—Malaria, Ebola, et cetera. These are already found in t
Anthrax = Weapon of Mass Distraction (Score:2)
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I guess terrorist will have to get cocaine popular before using it. Kinda defeats the whole terror thing when people are all happy and stuff though.
bunch of reasons (Score:2)
(1) People have an irrational fear of radiation and anything "nuclear".
(2) It's damned hard to create a deadly pathogen that's any worse than what already is out there.
(3) Radioactivity is trivial to detect, new pathogens are pretty much impossible to detect, so it's hard to "scrutinize" the work.
Bio is hard because it's all been done: (Score:3)
"expert panels have concluded that there is no need for intrusive monitoring of microbiologists engaged in unclassified research."
For good reason.
First, the knowledge is more widespread.
We have large numbers of researchers/lab workers/hospital lab techs that could do the neccesary techniques for much of biological work.
We have to have them in large numbers to keep us safer from the NATURAL bioweapons we face every day.
Such well known killers as malaria, bacterial pneumonia, a whole range of virii, the various strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria we keep a running treadmill race going with, etc, etc.
Putting all of these lab/hospital workers (Yes, they are working with pathogens. Why else do you think they're doing culturing of that throat swab your doctor took?) under a magnifying glass is needless, discouraging to those who might enter the field, and actively disruptive to trying to fight disease.
Second, nature completely outclasses us.
Someone in a lab can do one experiment every few days/weeks, maybe. Mother nature can and does do billions to trillions of experiments all in parallel.
The bioweapon arms race has been going on in nature for billions of years (yes, billions. Single cell life has been around that long and competing. Multicelled life and armor/teeth is a latecomer at 600 million or so). Every nasty trick you're likely to think of to put into your superbug has been tried multiple times naturally.
The metallo-beta-lactamases that are the hot new nasty in antibiotic resistance? They aren't new. They were old genetic material that were present in a minority of bacteria, and then spread due to it being an advantage for some bacteria in some cases. None of the antibiotic resistance we see is "new". It's all relics in the bacterial genomes that have become useful again. Why? Because Mom Nature already tried those tricks.
And,it's the same for virii or any other one you can think of.
"Nuclear" sounds dangerous. It's just bad P.R. (Score:4, Insightful)
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MRI machines (magnetic resonance imaging) are called that because when they called them NMR machines originally, people were afraid of the word "nuclear" in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. Even though MRI machines are still exactly the same thing and still measure nuclear magnetic resonance, they no longer use the word "nuclear", because no one wanted to be stuffed in a tube of a machine that had "nuclear" in its name!! People confused it with nuclear imaging [wikipedia.org] in which radioactive isotopes really are injected into the human body and then imaging is performed to see how the isotope is distributed and if it clusters in certain parts of the body.
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People are scared of "nukes", and not-so-much of teeny little microbes, though look at all of the wacky episodes of ReGenesis [wikipedia.org], a canadian show about the canadian equivalent of the CDC and a genomics lab, to see the crazy plotlines of what could go wrong with bio-organisms. Psych also did an episode, "Death is in the Air", Season 4, Episode 13, that used "Bob" from Regenesis as the same sort of scientist. See my other post here [slashdot.org] for links to those episodes.
well, duh (Score:2)
Intrusive regulation "may" discourage infectious disease research? Of course it would. It has done just that for (non-medical) nuclear research.
We sent a UCLA professor to jail when a student in his lab died in an accident related to poor training. Maybe that's the right idea.
If a deadly accident or malicious release occurs from your lab, you go to jail. Just reiterate that to everyone: you're ultimately responsible for what comes out of your lab. It's a lot less harsh than the permanent label you earn
Proliferation, not Research, is the issue (Score:2)
I hear everyone arguing about what a scientist could produce, and how, and how bad it could/would be...but that isn't the issue at all here. If you're going to talk about nuclear technology vs. pathogen technology, then you need to talk about proliferation. The treaties at stake, the classification of information, export controls...none of these are about *doing* research, they're about the control of knowledge needed to do research. The controls on nuclear research and engineering are about proliferation
'01 Anthrax attacks NOT shown to be an inside job (Score:2)
The second paragraph of the linked article makes this bogus assertion:
Since 2008, when investigators led by the FBI's Washington Field Office identified Bruce E. Ivins, an Army civilian research scientist, as the sole perpetrator, the collective response has been to minimize discussion of the problem, indulge in wishful thinking, and enact cosmetic changes.
Here is a Wednesday, Feb 16, 2011 article by Salon's Glenn Greenwald, titled "Serious doubt cast on FBI’s anthrax case against Bruce Ivins - A scientific panel concludes the Government overstated its genetic evidence against Bruce Ivins": http://www.salon.com/2011/02/16/ivans/ [salon.com]
We Measure Short (Score:2)
We have no ability at all to predict whether a person will strike out or not. The notion that we can watch, predict, or stop bad actors is a fantasy.
First we have no way to determine if an individual is acting on his own impulses or is being coerced. A family member could be held by terrorists for example. We also have big problems spotting people with abnormal levels of greed who might be bribed. Follow that up
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Spill any chemical you want - that's all there is and all I have to do to escape it is not go where it's laying. Weaponized anthrax? Smallpox? Pandemic flu? Yeah, good luck escaping that shit by staying away from the place of the initial outbreak.
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Thats not necessarily true. There some pollutants that stick around for a good while. Some of those could be mixed into a bioengineering bacterium that would stick around for awhile in the environment as well. Again its all unpredictable, but you could really screw up an ecosystem for decades by using 1 pathogen targeted at the right environment with the right payload.
DDT is a chemical that comes to mind. Something like that wouldn't be as dramatic as zombies but would definitely make for a devastating affe
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Oh, yes. A doomsday device that gets preyed upon by every protozoan, yeast, and bacterium in the world. How brilliant. At least that rules out any organization other than a lunatic from employing it!
Why do you think MRSA—by all means a real, legitimate biological threat that isn't the fantasy of a powerhungry politician—is only found in hospitals and factory farms? The metabolic cost of the antibiotic resistance makes it vulnerable to the environment. The more radically efficient a disease is, t
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"during the outbreak the fatality of SARS was less than 1% for people aged 24 or younger, 6% for those 25 to 44, 15% for those 45 to 64, and more than 50% for those over 65."
Are you saying it is less important because it is a possible resolution to the "social security crisis"?
What?!? I couldn't find any of the expected juvenile jokes involving scientists, small things, and magnifying glasses.
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however, engineered pathogens are not subject to such restrictions, modify a rhinovirus so that it also craps all over p53 and now you have a cancer causing cold.
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Your suggestion is a perfect example of why engineering wouldn't work.
Rhinoviruses are successful because they mutate rapidly. The only thing that prevents them from corrupting their genes completely and disappearing is the tiny chance that they won't misfold and will, instead, produce new viable virions after host infection.
A payload protein specifically meant to interfere with a normal cellular function would (a) be selected against due to a high rate of failure and (b) not serve the virus in any capacity
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Re:Oh god, please die in a fire right now (Score:5, Interesting)
As I understand it, the body is quite efficient at neutralizing viruses or bacteria that it has encountered before because the body has to create antibodies that can kill a particular virus, but once those antibodies are created they can be recreated very fast. That's why vaccine works. The flu and cold viruses mutate rapidly so each time you get infected it's a "new" virus because your body could get rid of the old virus quite fast the second time.
On the other hand, if somebody engineered a virus that has static genes, but very high mortality rate, it would no matter, since people would only get infected by it once (which would be the "first time") and then they would die. After all, human bodies do not keep a centralized antivirus database for the entire population ("John was infected by a similar virus once, here's how you build the antibodies"), just for the individual.
So, the effectiveness of a static virus would most likely be limited by how fast a vaccine can be created and distributed.
Re:Oh god, please die in a fire right now (Score:4, Informative)
No, a static virus would be recognized by the body too quickly. The immune system constantly circulates a huge pool of antibody-producing cells, each of which detects a different target (antigen). If something gets detected, then the antibody-producing cell responsible is told to reproduce aggressively. The memory functionality is simply accomplished by keeping more of that cell line around. It's like a very basic single-layer neural network. Short of killing the entire organism simultaneously, no static virus can be effective. Even HIV, a very rapidly-mutating virus, has problems overcoming the immune system immediately following an infection.
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Now I know. Thanks for the explanation.
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Subtle, and possibly quite effective at cleansing the earth of its two-legged parasites, but I prefer the more direct and messy approach of using the Ebola glycoprotein.
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IIUC, weaponized anthrax can generally be avoided by not being where it is being used. That isn't, of course, true of the others.
Suggest a reconsideration (Score:2)
because nobody could distribute the daily HF etchant load so as to kill very many people. Contrast that with the Black Death, which killed 1/3 of Europe through the movement of fleas on rats on ships. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death [wikipedia.org]
Chemweapons have to be distributed and don't extend their effects very far beyond their delivery locus. Bioweapons can propagate. Engineer a latency between infection and onset of symptoms of say, 100 days into an airborne pathogen with high clinical mortality and watch
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Engineered bioweapons cannot propagate. Incubation period is inversely proportionate to severity of symptoms, except for complex organisms like protozoans. Bacteria and viruses both mutate too quickly for a delayed lethal phenotype to be in their interest, otherwise we would see this more frequently in the wild.
The only highly-spread bioweapon (that comes to mind) not defeated by a combination of sanitation and the environment is malaria. Rather crucially, malaria is very common in third-world countries, wh
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The inverse correlation between incubation period and symptom severity is what one would expect from successful in-the-wild pathogens. I get that evolutionary processes have given us the pathogen behavior you describe.
However, I don't think what we currently know is that's all that's possible. I suspect the set of potential (engineerable) pathogenic behavior is broader than what we observe in the wild, and broader than what we currently think probable.
Your statement "Engineered bioweapons cannot propagate"
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I've put up the explanation in another comment, but the gist of it is this: the DNA in bacteria and viruses evolves to do whatever is necessary to survive. If you do not set it up so that your construct is vital to the cell's survival, it will drop that functionality within a few days to a week of propagating in the wild. Viruses have been very frustrating to use for controlled engineering tasks like gene replacement because they tend to kill more target cells (without replication) than they transfect, and
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The plague took months to spread around Europe when there was no sanitation whatsoever. As a weapon of mass destruction, diseases are (a) wildly impractical and (b) much less convenient than many alternatives.
The Spanish Flu took about six weeks to go from barely noticeable levels to its peak. Other flu strains do the same.
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And they're all similarly non-perilous in the face of modern medicine.
That's not correct. The Spanish flu was a particularly deadly strain, unlike most other flu variants before and since and we don't really know why it was so bad. It is completely possible for a deadly new flu (or other disease) variant to crop up for which we just don't have the proper medicines. Flu outbreaks can be reduced with vaccination campaigns, but that depends on the correct prediction of what flu types will be going around in a few months. Sometimes the flu shots are effective and sometimes th
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The rate of transmission of highly contagious diseases is related to the common speed of travel, and also to the fastest normal speed of travel, and also to the number (not percentage) of people travelling.
So you can't say that because it took months to spread around Europe when the fastest speed was a fast horse, and the common speed was oxcart, and the number of people travelling was extremely low means that it would take months now. Actually it can take days to spread from New York to Shanghai. (It's u
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Of course there is an easy way to prevent the agent from infecting your own populace at a future point... they're called vaccines.
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If there was any reason that we should have universal healthcare it is the threat of biological weapons.
Since it's not (the current system of people showing up in US (since that's the only place with this sort of debate) emergency rooms actually works just as well), the contrapositive of your conditional statement asserts that no reason exists for universal healthcare.
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Nope. Nucleic acid is not terribly stable stuff and for relatively short sequences every possible combination already exists in nature. Proteins aren't terrifically stable either and the vast majority require a three dimensional fold on top of the chemical structure in order to function. You can get rid of that fold-denature the p
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O, that's correct enough. The conclusion doesn't follow, but the facts are correct.
The chance of it happening by accident are quite low. As proof, we only have three or four instances in all of history. (Flu, black death, bubonic plague, maybe another one or two.)
This, however, doesn't address the current situation. We now have a much denser and more mobile population than ever before. And we've been carefully incubating LOTS of microbes to be immune to all the treatments we possess. So there's lots o
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No sequence of nucleic acid, by itself, is dangerous. It gets obliterated by the stuff on your finger, for example.
You need to shoot it into an organism, get it stably being transcribed into proteins, and then after all that actually wind up with an organism that's viable and has good disease properties. Most "flesh eating bacteria" for example are normal throat bacteria that are normally harmless.
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It's not. There aren't. And if there were, it would be cheaper to do anything else, like one of the many missing Russian nukes. All things die when left alone in the wild. This fearmongering is the product of years of zombie fantasies in popular culture. All of it is utter nonsense.
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This fearmongering is the product of years of zombie fantasies in popular culture. All of it is utter nonsense.
Second that. Though it's not just zombies.
Plagues, both natural and manmade, are a staple of apocalyptic fiction. Current craze is zombies, but they're a recent (and effective) retelling of a very old meme.
Stop me if you've read this one: "PLAGUENAME a (virus/bacteria/prion/plot device) created by (godless researchers/actual god(s)/mother nature/snidley whiplash) swept the globe after (accident/outbreak in the third world/contrived event) killing (millions/billions/everyone but our heroes), and turning ou
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Apocalyptic plagues are an evolutionary dead end. If it kills quickly and surely enough to be a weapon, it's not a particularly fit organism because its host will tend to die before they can infect others.
I'm far more scared of pathogens than nukes, though, and I don't think this idea deserves the derision it's getting. Prion diseases, for example, are really terrifying stuff. The kuru strain of the CJD prion, for example, exhibited an incubation period of between 5 and 20 years. If you were really determin
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Weaponisation of prions is an interesting angle I hadn't considered, although it looks like research into BSE and CJD is far enough along that, if Kuru were weaponised today and spread amongst a million people, we would notice it and cure it before it started causing symptoms. (That might be a little on the optimistic side, but presumably funding and other resources would be reallocated in such a situation.) Engineering new prions also seems like a woefully wasteful plan, and ultimately all such superdiseas
Re: Oh god, please die in a fire right now (Score:3, Interesting)
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I'm far more scared of pathogens than nukes, though, and I don't think this idea deserves the derision it's getting. Prion diseases, for example, are really terrifying stuff. The kuru strain of the CJD prion, for example, exhibited an incubation period of between 5 and 20 years. If you were really determined, you could get that disease into a lot of people before it started showing itself.
There is no such thing as a 'kuru strain' of the CJD prion. Prions are not infectious organisms. If you get exposed to pathogenic prions, the prions naturally found in your brain are converted into pathogenic prions. This process is more akin to crystallization, rather than a standard infectious process. If you get exposed to pathogenic prions from humans, cows, sheep, or gerbils... the course of the infection is only determined by how you were exposed, how much of the protein you were exposed to,
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An organisms role is to generate more copies of itself, it doesn't matter if it wipe out 99% of the host during that periods as long as it spreads. If increased virulance spreads better than being benign the virulence wins as more copies of that clade will spread.
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Yah. But if the incubation period were 5 years, and it were (slightly) contagious during the last two years before obvious symptoms...
Then there's the question of how we would notice. If the symptoms were increasing lack of attention to detail slowly progressing over another 5 years to total unconsciousness (but not death). Since it is proposed to be very slow, there might well not be any obvious changes.
OTOH, that kind of disease WOULD require an expert to fabricate it. Someone more expert than I belie
Spanish Flu (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking of naive. You're sure of this. Just a 'few sequences' and poof, the end of life as we know it?
Obviously that seems exceedingly unlikely so to try to cut through irrational fears lets try looking at a real disease. The Spanish flu of 1918 killed 50-100 million people world wide. If we scale that as a percentage of the population today that number would be 180-300 million and that is for a disease which 80-90% of the people who caught it survived. This is clearly comparable to several, powerful nuclear weapons and for something as infectious as flu it is unlikely that you could stop it once it got out e.g. the recent swine flu outbreak.
So for those involved in researching viruses with the same, or worse, potential as the spanish flu why shouldn't there be similar safe guards to nuclear weapons researchers? The consequences of material getting out is similar in both cases and, in a world with suicide bombers, I'm not sure I'd rely on the fact that a biological weapon may well kill the one who releases it to stop if from happening.
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Because anyone with a decent knowledge of virology could pull an attack off without access to any "restricted" materials, they might not succeed, but if you think that you are secure because you watched the experts you just missed well more than 90% of the risk.
Re:Spanish Flu (Score:5, Insightful)
This. The potential "super virus" that was developed a few months back wasn't done with any complex genetic engineering. They just passed it between ferrets for a few generations, and wound up with the most dangerous disease currently imaginable.
You want a risk factor? Factory farms swimming in our antibiotics of last resort for no good reason.
Re:Spanish Flu (Score:5, Interesting)
The consequences of the material getting out are worse with the pathogens because it doesn't take any technical capability at all to start the spread of the pathogen. All a person has to do is get infected, or get another person infected.
Steal 20 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium and you have 20 of raw material that you need a Ph.D. and a lot of engineering knowledge to convert into a bomb that can kill millions of people.
Also, the pathogen is millions of times easier to conceal.
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Don't fear it, sing it! (Score:2)
A deadly pathogen you know
He'd heard of microbes like Tetanus
Malaria spread by mosquitos
Why not a little Spanish Flu
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Our ability to identify and quarantine disease is obviously what it was at the beginning of the 20th century. No big breakthroughs since then.
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Our ability to identify and quarantine disease is obviously what it was at the beginning of the 20th century. No big breakthroughs since then.
Problem is, the breakthroughs we've made in the past 50 years or so have been in a time with relatively few 'flu-like pandemics. We don't actually know if the breakthroughs will help with anything that infectious. We might be in a good position to deal with it, or that might just be total hubris.
Well, punk? Do you feel lucky?
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No big breakthroughs since then.
Like air travel? Coupled with a higher population density I'm not convinved the net affect of breakthroughs has made containment easier. Again, sticking to real events as a guideline, containment did not work with swine flu did it?
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FWIW, I believe that Neutron bombs don't significantly damage the real estate attacked.
OTOH, there are reported to have been developed diseases that are 100% fatal to exposed individuals. (They were ferrets, not people, but ferrets were chosen because they are immunologically similar to people WRT that disease.) Also, I believe, it was contagious before the first symptoms appeared. (Not that that matters too much, since many companies have employment policies that strongly encourage people to come to wor
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I don't think you know a thing about evolution.
Multiple antibiotic-resistant bacteria are not found in the wild unless there is an excess of antibiotics significant enough to justify the metabolic cost of wasting energy on keeping the resistance alive. What bacteria do not need, they do not keep. Take the patients out of the hospitals and they will do just fine. You should have picked a better example, like Russia's tuberculosis epidemic, but I get the feeling that if you had anything more than surface know
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Happily, you're not the one making policy decisions on this.
Ebola comes to mind.
Go back to your corner.
Speaking of corners, Elboa sits in one. It's not a very good bioweapon. Really virulent viruses tend to be crappy weapons. Once you kill your vector, you're pretty much dead yourself unless you simultaneously invoke the deux ex machina of a Zombie Apocalypse.
Now that would be a good bioweapon. Even the CDC [cdc.gov] agrees with that.
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Ebola IS very dangerous to humans and it does spread, but there have been a lot of outbreaks and they always burn out in a few days. It kills its victims too fast to spread rapidly once people are aware that people are getting sick. To be a big threat to humans, a disease has to have a longer incubation. Smallpox, for example, had an incubation period of about 12 days.
Interestingly, during the 19th and early 20th centuries, a less-virulent form of smallpox evolved, called "variola minor." Patients with
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You forget the psychological effect. Certain diseases are way scarier than normal assassinations.
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If you're referring to the Spanish flu as your "one little bug", it lasted for three years and only killed 3-5% of the population. Furthermore, it was only able to spread as effectively as it did because of a communications blackout. Today, it would be no more dangerous to public health than SARS.
And if you're thinking of Malaria as your "another", that's somewhat treatable with Mefloquine, and like all existing diseases, could easily be imported by a smuggler.
Re:Intrusive Monitoring for Everybody! (Score:5, Informative)
What is intrusive anymore?
Things you don't need a warrant for:
-tracking someones travels via their cell phone
-reading their email
-any call that originates from another country or is destined for another country can be monitored/recorded
-who they have called/texted
-any and all business records [actually, are there ANY limitations on NSL's?]
-lots of other stuff, based on secret interpretations of laws, cherry picked from "friendly" lawyers, which you are not permitted to know about
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>Pathogen research offered no such advantage. Maybe if a version of the Nagasaki or Hiroshima bombings were to occur with pathogen research, you would start to see some more protests. Humans are not very good at understanding risks, such that it can take seeing cities of people perish in unimaginable hell before they actually care e
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Where was the "grim milestone" protest for Obama's Obama didn't go tarded and start as many wars as he could.
In the 70s and 80s, the anti-nuclear crowd was able to spread lots of FUD Yeah. FUD. Because humans never get lazy or forget to expect the unexpected.
because it helped the left gain political power. Yeah. Because every time there is an anti-nuclear protest it only charges the left.
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This is the kind of "scrutiny" they're talking about, BTW.
http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/op-eds/lessons-not-learned-insider-threats-pathogen-research [thebulletin.org]
Both determined that intrusive monitoring of microbiologists engaged in unclassified research would not necessarily increase protection against insider threats and rejected broad adoption of procedures that scientists and military personnel who work with nuclear weapons and fissile material must endure, such as random testing for alcohol, marijuana, cocaine
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Not so in the case of intellectual property. Imagine corporate black ops where a company eliminates a competitor by ensnaring their key employees with hookers loaded with chlamydia that has been weaponized with a fatal payload.
Real Reason (Score:2)
The real reason that people in nuclear establishments undergo extensive screening relates more to a cold war philosophy than public safety. They're just making sure that you don't sell those secrets to the Reds.