# Thoughts on bioweapons....



## scifimoth (Aug 12, 2003)

Okay...I am reading a book about smallpox and it mentions frightening possibilities. I am curious as other peoples thoughts on virology and microbiology. 
I have an interest in pathology and disease...give your five cents worth on monkeypox, SARS, west nile, ebola...and so on.
Incidentally...they might now have a vaccine for ebola


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## Foxbat (Aug 12, 2003)

I don't know much about specific diseases but here are my thoughts anyway:

I think the biggest problem with these types of weapons is that they are relatively inexpensive to develop. Why bother trying to keep up with the big boys in nuclear weapons development when you can develop something just as devastating for a fraction of the cost. Probably the most expensive thing to develop would be some sort of delivery system.

Most of us don't know much about this kind of thing..and that makes it all the more frightening and has given terrorism a new edge in recent months (they don't have to use such a weapon...or even have it - just the thought that they might is enough to cause fear in the population). 

Definitely dangerous times.


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## Brian G Turner (Aug 12, 2003)

Personally, my impression is that "smallpox" is used as a hype word. True, it was devastating - but there are supposed to be extremely tight restrictions on the actual remaining specimens.

What would be far worse would be re-enginerring of something like the virus for the common cold. I'm sure it won't be impossible to genetically modify something like that into a deadly killer. Likely easier than trying to obtain smallpox.

What do you think?


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## dwndrgn (Aug 12, 2003)

I see it as definitely dangerous, but I also see that the problems with actual use could keep anyone from using it as anything other than a deterrent.  If you've created something so deadly and invasive as a new virus - what's to stop that virus from destroying you and yours as well?


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## scifimoth (Aug 13, 2003)

Actually there were two places in the world that received smaples of smallpox after the eradication campaign was over...the CDC in the U.S. and a Lab in Russia. There is information on missing weaponsgrade smallpox after the iron curtain came down...
"Demon in the freezer" by Richard Preston talks about the implications and possibilities as far as what diseases many countries are engineering on the sly. 
People like Peter Jahrling are worried and that makes me worried....
As far as the threats of germwarfare would present to it's user...if you create it...would you not also create a vaccine along with it (if you serously were going to use it...)?!


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## Brian G Turner (Aug 19, 2003)

Certainly there are general security concerns - all "high security" areas are filled with liabilities known as "people". And sometimes the degree of irresponsibility can be quite amazing. 

I'm sure there was a report not long ago about researchers being able to build a simple virus from unrestricted (and not uncommon) lab apparatus and material. I'm afraid I can't remember the details - I tried to run a search the other day on the New Scientist website but I couldn't narrow it to a specific article.

Anyway, I'd still put more weight on a argument for the dangers of a specially engineered virus, rather than a high-profile suspect such as smallpox. In terms of effort I'm it would be easier - so if you're concerned about the smallpox then think on the implications of a specifically engineered adenovirus mutant, or similar.

Not trying to scare you - I really don't see the possibility of seeing anything like in Stephen King's "The Stand" - but I would expect more incidents like the recent SARS outbreak - and with far darker origins.


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## scifimoth (Aug 20, 2003)

Actually pox viruses are rather easy to muck about with...Australian scientist inserted IL4-genes into mousepox...and the altered vrius blew straight through their immune labmouse population. Outsh!
And you are right is not very hard to engineer a virus....and you can order the things you need online even...sigh!
You know originally disease was nature's way of population control...but we are like a petridish gone bad. There are far more of us that there should be, and with the world as connected as it is now a pandemic is not so impossible...as a matter of fact AIDS is a pandemic.
It really won't matter what virus is being used...if it is weaponized it will be bad news either way.


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## Brian G Turner (Aug 20, 2003)

Certainly right about the weaponised notion. And I do remember the reports about the mouse experiment. Certainly sent the chills up a lot of spines, that.


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## scifimoth (Aug 20, 2003)

Oh, yes. Some people were very upset that they puplished their study, but on the same note the ideas behind their research were allready well know among the scientific community. Using IL4 genes has been done for a long time.


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## nemesis (Aug 21, 2003)

Why use a virus when explosives have an easy shock value? I do not think that terrorists have the intelligence and patience for bioweapons.


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## scifimoth (Aug 22, 2003)

Have you seen the shock value of a picture of a person that has expired from hemorragic smallpox? It's pretty shocking... and it is not that difficult or all too timeconsuming a thing to create a bioweapon. The knowleddge is out there as are the materials.....


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## Brian G Turner (Aug 22, 2003)

Certainly shock value comes into it - but ease of use also. Groups like Hamas will always find it easier to get hold of - and use - explosive devices. But all it needs is one properly organised network with a psychotic enough leader, and you've got the makings of serious problems. Al Qaeda showed us that such networks - with million dollar financing - can and do exist.

Btw - I'm never seen pictures of someone expired from hemorragic smallpox - but I figure death from any disease never looks pretty.


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## Brian G Turner (Aug 23, 2003)

Apparently the US vaccination program against smallpox is closing:

*US smallpox vaccination plan grinds to a halt *

A plan to vaccinate nearly half a million healthcare workers in the US against smallpox in case of a bioterrorist attack has ground to a halt. Only 38,257 people have accepted vaccination, less than a tenth as many as planned. 

But the failure may run deeper. In a damning report released last week, the US Institute of Medicine, an independent advisory body, says the problem is not that so few have been vaccinated, but that so much time and money has been spent on the vaccination programme. It argues that this should have been spent on more important defensive measures such as disease surveillance and response plans. 

"There are many things more important than vaccinating people," says Brian Strom of the University of Pennsylvania, lead author of the report. "We have no idea if we're prepared for a bioterrorist attack." 

He cites the failure by doctors in Wisconsin to report cases of a disease similar to smallpox until 13 days after they saw the first rash (New Scientist print edition, 21 June, p 12). Luckily, it turned out to be monkeypox.

The vaccination programme was announced by President Bush in December 2002. The first phase was to be mandatory smallpox vaccinations for half a million military personnel, and voluntary vaccinations for another half a million "first responders" - the healthcare workers needed to carry out emergency vaccination and treat victims during an outbreak. 

That number was derived by multiplying the 2000-odd emergency rooms in the US by the staff needed to run them, says D. A. Henderson of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who led the successful worldwide smallpox eradication campaign in the 1970s and helped devise the US plan. "State health officers counted 420,000 people they would want to vaccinate to provide some reasonable standard of emergency care."

But doctors and nurses stayed away in droves. The vaccine is a live virus that can spread from person to person and might have harmed patients, especially those with impaired immunity. Major hospitals, such as the Virginia Commonwealth University Health System and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, refused to have any of their staff vaccinated. 

It was also not clear whether there would be any compensation for staff needing time off or medical care due to vaccine complications. Such compensation has been approved in principle but the details have still not been published.

Add to this mounting scepticism about the likelihood of a smallpox attack, and it now seems clear there will be no flood of volunteers, Strom predicts. "The CDC calls it a natural pause," he says. "But the first phase of the plan is now functionally over."

The second phase, in which the vaccine was to be offered to millions more healthcare workers and the public, was quietly shelved by the CDC in June, after recently vaccinated soldiers and civilians developed complications. There were 52 cases of pericardial or heart inflammation. There were also other heart problems, including 8 heart attacks, 3 of them fatal, though this was in the normal range.

"Where we go from here remains to be decided," Henderson says. "It would be desirable to have more vaccinated, but this is, after all, a voluntary programme." 

However, says Strom, with half a million vaccinated military personnel, there may already be enough people to carry out emergency vaccination. What is lacking, he says, is any detailed plan for calling on them after an attack.


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## scifimoth (Aug 23, 2003)

Yep, the vaccine ( made from cowpox...called vaccinia) is not very safe. If I remember correctly about 20 % of people can not receive the current vaccine...which is one of the reasons some scientists are involved research on live smallpox....there is a lot of tension about this among the scientific community about this.

Smallpox is an especially ulgy disease....I can't remember but a certain amount of cases will become hemorragic as the immune system is overrun by a cytokine storm and the clotting cascade of the blood goes awry...


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## littlemissattitude (Aug 25, 2003)

I read a report a couple of days ago that, contrary to what was reported when trying to get people behind the new vaccination program, those previously vaccinated for smallpox are probably protected enough to not get the disease for up to 75 years.  That works for me - I was vaccinated as a child.  There is no way I would get vaccinated again unless there was a demonstrated outbreak that was shown to be infecting previously vaccinated individuals.  Even then, I might take my chances, considering some of the side effects.


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## scifimoth (Aug 26, 2003)

Scientist as ever disagree about the potency of the vaccinia vaccine...some of them say it protects no longer than about 5 years. 
However I would think vaccinating at this point would be to put the cart before the horse. If there are ever reported and confirmed cases of smallpox...well...that would be when to worry.


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## hermes705 (Aug 27, 2003)

Hi,

I use to live in Reston Va and little did I know at that time that there was a biological research lab three miles from our home in Herndon Va.  They wrote a book about a virus, eboli I think, that leaked out and no one ever heard about the breach until months or in my case years later after I had left the Greater
Washington D.C. area.  The book called the "HOT ZONE" really opened my eyes as to how easily things like this could ocurr and how little the public really finds  out at that time.

*peace profound to you and all  your loved ones*
Hermes SRC


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## littlemissattitude (Aug 28, 2003)

Oh, yes.  Isn't it great what the government and private research institutions will do in your backyard without ever telling you about it.  In my case, it was rocket fuel and experimental nuclear reactors (one of which went into partial meltdown) that had been in use since the late 1940s and early 1950s, but didn't come to public notice until 1989.  I'll write more about it sometime; it's an interesting story.


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## Brian G Turner (Aug 28, 2003)

Hi there *hermes705*, and welcome to the chronicles-network!

I've never actually heard of that either - my immediate thoughts were of the movie "Outbreak". And to have ebola escape is just plain scary. Not an easily transmited virus, but one of the most fearsome in its effects.


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## scifimoth (Aug 28, 2003)

Most hemorragic fevers are pretty scarry customers.
South of the border they are concerned with the way dengue fever seems to be moving northward with the mosquitoes. Yet another friendly disease brought to you by curtesy of a blood-sucking insect. West Nile is haning out here in Iowa and horse owners are luckily able to now vaccinate their equines. (It had a 30 % kill rate in horses I think).
Hermes I have read about the outbreak at the lab in Reston....as a matter of fact they named the strain of ebola that ran through that lab...ebola reston. It's a killer in monkeys but not dangerous to people.


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## Starbeast (Nov 17, 2011)

scifimoth said:


> Okay...I am reading a book about smallpox and it mentions frightening possibilities. I am curious as other peoples thoughts on virology and microbiology.


 
The scariest thing that I think about is that governments are going to develope bioweapons no matter what civilians say. Like any weapon, if it can kill very effectively and cause massive casualties, then they'll desire to have it. Plus, as wars continue to thrive on this planet, the growing number of casualties are not soldiers, it's civilians.

It saddens and sickens me that today the real targets of death and destruction from government weapons are civilians. Meanwhile domestic terrorists (druglords, hate groups, etc....) are allowed to thrive, so-much-so that they are becoming huge and organized, and when one of them does something extreme, the big-shots of the country act surprised when people get killed.

I could go on, but I've said enough.


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## monsterchic (Nov 21, 2011)

Starbeast said:


> The scariest thing that I think about is that governments are going to develope bioweapons no matter what civilians say. Like any weapon, if it can kill very effectively and cause massive casualties, then they'll desire to have it. Plus, as wars continue to thrive on this planet, the growing number of casualties are not soldiers, it's civilians.
> 
> It saddens and sickens me that today the real targets of death and destruction from government weapons are civilians. Meanwhile domestic terrorists (druglords, hate groups, etc....) are allowed to thrive, so-much-so that they are becoming huge and organized, and when one of them does something extreme, the big-shots of the country act surprised when people get killed.
> 
> I could go on, but I've said enough.


 
Agreed-it's just nasty that civilians are being targeted


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## Snowdog (Nov 24, 2011)

From a practical point of view the problem of using bio-weapons on a large scale is that they are both indiscriminate and difficult to target. Nor are they certain killers. I read "The Hot Zone" and if I remember correctly even Ebola has a less than 50% death rate (though it wasn't the worst virus mentioned from what I recall). 

On a smaller scale though they have already been deployed successfully. Georgi Markov springs to mind and there must have been others.

Should they be used? Of course not. But are they any worse than killing with radiation through an atom bomb or depleted uranium, or napalm? Treating such weapons as a separate category and pretending they are so much worse than many "conventional" weapons simply gives certain States both a monopoly and a handy excuse (true or not) to act aganst whatever country they like. As well as for the deployment of some truly horrendous "conventional" weapons that no-one seems bothered about, because, hey, they're not weapons of mass destruction. Except that they are. It could even be argued that if it could be made to work and delivered accurately, or as (in)accurately as conventional warheads are today, a CO or CO2 bomb would be considerably more humane to its victims than, for instance, cluster bombs.

Rather than focussing on one sort of weaponry, all these horror weapons need to be lumped together as "weapons of mass destruction" and outlawed. OK, that'll never happen but you will never get small States to willingly give up or not develop such weapons while the big States hang on to them. And from the terrorism POV, terrorists can't use those weapons unless the big States first develop them. The fault for the use of all these weapons, whoever uses them down the line, lies primarily with the arms manufacurers, the US, Britain, Russia, Israel etc., for whom making weapons for killing people is big business.

Back on topic - I thought that in the US and Britain, at least, bio-weapons research was illegal, except for purely defensive purposes. Has that changed since 9/11?


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## Dave (Nov 24, 2011)

Snowdog said:


> From a practical point of view the problem of using bio-weapons on a large scale is that they are both indiscriminate and difficult to target.


They always were until now, but using genetic engineering it isn't too much of a stretch to imagine a virus designed that would attack only people with a particular gene or genotype. If applied to some racial characteristic the result would be genocide on a scale never seen before. Imagine if a Joseph Mengele-type character had access to that technology?

Edit: That actually sounds more like the plot of a bad James Bond film.


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## Snowdog (Nov 24, 2011)

Frank Herbert - The White Plague

The essential message of the book is that, no matter how terrible an act is, or how awful the consequences, those responsible rarely, if ever, admit wrongdoing or mistakes, or change their behaviour. Almost always they will blame others for the consequences of their actions. It's a powerful novel, but not one I enjoyed or would want to read again.


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## RJM Corbet (Dec 30, 2011)

If I had to choose between anthrax and being burned to death in a tank, I'd probably choose the former?

War is never pretty? Unfortunately it's often civilians who suffer too. From Alexander to Ceasar to Napoleon: scorched earth, etc. Even Word War 2, they were bombing the sh*t out of each others cities? Both sides. Children, old people ...


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## Metryq (Dec 30, 2011)

RJM Corbet said:


> Unfortunately it's often civilians who suffer too. From Alexander to Ceasar to Napoleon: scorched earth, etc. Even Word War 2, they were bombing the sh*t out of each others cities? Both sides. Children, old people ...



I've never understood this "civilized warfare" mentality, like the Geneva conventions. When two countries resort to war, diplomacy has been tossed aside. A battle field isn't some place where soldiers go to duke it out. The primary goal in war is not necessarily to kill the enemy, but to destroy his ability to make war. That means  wrecking his economy and industry. And guess what? Non-combatants are not isolated from that!


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