European Lab to Publish Recipe for Deadly Virus

[Conley]

A deadly strain of bird flu with the potential to infect and kill millions of people has been created in a laboratory by European scientists – who now want to publish full details of how they did it.


The discovery has prompted fears within the US Government that the knowledge will fall into the hands of terrorists wanting to use it as a bio-weapon of mass destruction.

Some scientists are questioning whether the research should ever have been undertaken in a university laboratory, instead of at a military facility.

The US Government is now taking advice on whether the information is too dangerous to be published.

To see the graphic: The last outbreak - A deadly virus even before the latest twist (http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/76089964?access_key=key-6hfulob7a5od4sj7iin)

"The fear is that if you create something this deadly and it goes into a global pandemic, the mortality and cost to the world could be massive," a senior scientific adviser to the US Government told The
Independent, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"The worst-case scenario here is worse than anything you can imagine."

For the first time the researchers have been able to mutate the H5N1 strain of avian influenza so that it can be transmitted easily through the air in coughs and sneezes. Until now, it was thought that H5N1 bird flu could only be transmitted between humans via very close physical contact.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/alarm-as-dutch-lab-creates-highly-contagious-killer-flu-6279474.html

How long do we have before a technological breakthrough leads to a global disaster? Nuclear, biological weapons, other future tech...it seems as if it is just a matter of time until this sort of thing falls into the wrong hands.

[Mister D]

Sounds delicious!

The Soviets built quite an arsenal of biological weapons. We may actually be in less danger now than 30 years ago.

[Conley]

Delicious? Say what you will about the Soviets but at least they guarded their weapons technology...this is an airborne virus with a 60% kill rate that isn't being guarded at all.

[Mister D]

You said recipe. Bad joke. :undecided:

I'm not saying it's not a concern. I'm just saying that the Soviets (and the US too) stockpiled this kind of crap for decades. Moreover, the USSR had an extensive biological weapons program. I just think that this kind of thing was probaby a lot more common when we were little kids but it was top secret. The fact that it's guarded doesn't make me feel fundamentally sfare. That these weapons exist at all is the concern.

[Conley]

:laugh: I get it now...I was thinking bird flu soup.

I hear what you're saying. I guess in instances like the CMC we were closer to Armageddon than ever before (or since). There was another instance where a USSR officer was ordered to launch a nuke but disobeyed. I suppose I felt with the USSR there was at least some degree of back-and-forth, whereas I will never be comfortable with a nuclear Iran or these kinds of bio-weapons falling into the hands of people who's goal is to actually destroy Western civilization. It's like any weapon technology that came before it, it disseminates and eventually will be in the hands of those who will not use it responsibly.

[Mister D]

:laugh: I get it now...I was thinking bird flu soup.

I hear what you're saying. I guess in instances like the CMC we were closer to Armageddon than ever before (or since). There was another instance where a USSR officer was ordered to launch a nuke but disobeyed. I suppose I felt with the USSR there was at least some degree of back-and-forth, whereas I will never be comfortable with a nuclear Iran or these kinds of bio-weapons falling into the hands of people who's goal is to actually destroy Western civilization. It's like any weapon technology that came before it, it disseminates and eventually will be in the hands of those who will not use it responsibly.

I definitely understand your concerns. That's the problem with weapons techonology. Over time there is an inevitable process of diffusion.

[Mister D]

Comforting story...

The Sverdlovsk anthrax leak was an incident when spores (http://thepoliticalforums.com/wiki/Spores) of anthrax (http://thepoliticalforums.com/wiki/Anthrax) were accidentally released from a military facility in the city of Sverdlovsk (formerly, and now again, Yekaterinburg (http://thepoliticalforums.com/wiki/Yekaterinburg)) 1450 km east of Moscow on April 2, 1979. This accident is sometimes called "biological Chernobyl (http://thepoliticalforums.com/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster)".[1] (http://thepoliticalforums.com/#cite_note-Alibek-0) The ensuing outbreak of the disease resulted in approximately 100 deaths, although the exact number of victims remains unknown. The cause of the outbreak had for years been denied by the Soviet Union (http://thepoliticalforums.com/wiki/Soviet_Union), which blamed the deaths on intestinal exposure due to the consumption of tainted meat from the area, and subcutaneous (http://thepoliticalforums.com/wiki/Subcutaneous_tissue) exposure due to butchers handling the tainted meat. All medical records of the victims had been removed in order to avoid revelations of serious violations of the Biological Weapons Convention (http://thepoliticalforums.com/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention).

SNIP

The produced anthrax culture had to be dried to produce a fine powder for use as an aerosol. Large filters over the exhaust pipes were the only barriers between the anthrax dust and the outside environment. On the last Friday of March 1979, a technician removed a clogged filter while drying machines were temporarily turned off. He left a written notice, but did not write this down in the logbook as he was supposed to do. The supervisor of the next shift did not find anything unusual in the logbook, and turned the machines on. In a few hours, someone found that the filter was missing and reinstalled it. The incident was reported to military command, but local and city officials were not immediately informed. Boris Yeltsin (http://thepoliticalforums.com/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin), a local Communist Party boss at this time, helped cover up the accident.[1] (http://thepoliticalforums.com/#cite_note-Alibek-0)
All workers of a ceramic plant across the street fell ill during the next few days. Almost all of them died in a week. The death toll was at least 105, but the exact number is unknown as all hospital records and other evidence were destroyed by the KGB (http://thepoliticalforums.com/wiki/KGB), according to former Biopreparat (http://thepoliticalforums.com/wiki/Biopreparat) deputy director Ken Alibek (http://thepoliticalforums.com/wiki/Ken_Alibek).[1] (http://thepoliticalforums.com/#cite_note-Alibek-0)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak

[Conley]

Yeesh, that's awful. At least Anthrax isn't contagious person-to-person like a virus.

[Mister D]

Can you imagine a frigging civilian industry being across the street from a biological weapons lab? WTF?

[Peter1469]

It is certainly concerning.

[Conley]

On one hand I can't, but then again I don't suppose they advertise the location of these things and for security purposes maybe they have them in common areas. I doubt that Dutch university lab is at all isolated and it seems that this kind of research is becoming more and more common across the globe. :undecided:

[Mister D]

I would hope that ours are out in the desert but who knows. You're right that it won't be advertised. Holland is kind of small but the US and the former USSR have plenty of open space to locate an Area 51 type of base.

[MMC]

I am sure some of it is.....althought it sucks to be living down around the CDC around Atlanta. Sure would hate to see one of those major diseases get released from down there. Oh and they got some shit thats Ten Times worse than Avian Bird Flu.

Course then it's great if they got the cure for something and one is living down there. Just sayin! :undecided:

[Mister D]

Yeah, who knows what the government holds in secret.

[waltky]

Russian reindeer overpopulation to be culled due to anthrax outbreak
http://www.politicalforum.com/images/smilies/confused.gif
Russian reindeer to be culled due to anthrax outbreak
Tue, Oct 11, 2016 - A governor in Russia’s far north has said the reindeer population will be reduced by 100,000 after an anthrax outbreak, but scientists have said twice as many need to be culled.


Reindeer herding is an important industry and livelihood for people in the Yamal-Nenets region. Yamal-Nenets Governor Dmitry Kobylkin told state news agency RIA Novosti that about 100,000 reindeer would be culled this winter because overpopulation was straining a limited food supply and increasing the risk of anthrax infection. An outbreak in Yamal-Nenets — the first since 1941 — killed a 12-year-old boy and more than 2,500 reindeer in July and August.

Scientists and officials blamed the awakening of the “zombie infection” on abnormally hot temperatures caused by climate change. Thawing of the permafrost soil can release the frozen bacteria. “For [lack of fodder], some herder families take their animals to graze in restricted areas where there’s a high risk of Siberian plague infection,” Kobylkin said, using the Russian name for anthrax, a bacterial infection often transmitted through contaminated food or water. Regional authorities are to buy the reindeer to be culled and process the meat, he said. Officials have said reindeer meat exports could increase from 300 tonnes last year to 800 tonnes this year.

More than 750,000 reindeer live in the Yamal-Nenets region, even though the region’s pasture land can support only 386,000 reindeer without degrading, Urals Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology director Vladimir Bogdanov told Rossiyskaya Gazeta. At least 200,000 reindeer need to be culled, he said. However, reducing the reindeer population is a thorny political issue, since that is how many local people earn a living.

Following Kobylkin’s remarks, reindeer herder Yeiko Serotetto started a petition to Russian President Vladimir Putin calling for the reindeer population to be preserved. He argued that there would be no risk of anthrax infection if the government had not stopped vaccinating reindeer against the disease in 2007 and said the cull was “motivated by the interests of the gas-drilling industry.” Oil and gas exploration in the area has led to conflicts with local people in the past few years. Kobylkin said regional authorities are “working on the issue of job placement for the local population” after the planned cull.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2016/10/11/2003656953

[Peter1469]

sad