You think guns are dangerous? What about mutated viruses?

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The hens are cackling about firearms again particularly chickens of the Clan Little. Listen up cluck nics a panicky fowl. The sky is no falling, not just yet. Has anyone considered the possibility of some biochemical genius cooking up some nasty lethal and highly contagious viruses extracted from the blood, flesh and waste of avians? Talk about the chickens coming home to roost.

Yes, a mutated bird flu-like virus which could be developed in a home laboratory with no safety provisions and no oversight. There was a movie back a few years on that subject starring David Morse and Bruce Willis. It was called -12 Monkeys- Yes indeed, a mad scientist could equip himself at relatively low cost and by entirely legal means.

What will out panicky brethren do? Will they illegalize all scientific research, especially biology and chemistry? That is equivalent to shutting down the economy.

Twenty young kids died by gunshot. Twenty million could die by virus.

ruveyn

Twenty million seems optimistic.

This is serious business, BTW.

Teams led by virologists Ron Fouchier and Yoshihiro Kawaoka created mutated strains of bird flu (H5N1) which could potentially be used to create biological weapons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_ ... btype_H5N1

But no need to worry. This research is of course not publicly available.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... e10831.pdf
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6 ... 4.full.pdf
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6 ... 1.full.pdf

... Oops.

We should also quit searching for extraterrestrial bacteria in the solar system. If we find it, and humans come in contact with it, the alienness of it will wipe us out.

Yep. there defintly isnt enough to worry about in the world

If someone could concoct a virus deadly enough, resilient enough, and contagious enough all they'd need to do is release it in a busy airport and let it do its work.

The effect isn't just the disease itself but the psychological effect on society.

The movie Contagion gives at least a sample to ponder:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sYSyuuLk5g[/youtube]

It would spread like wildfire here,fracking chicken houses everywhere.
On some bags of poultry feed it tells you to report sick domestic fowl.How many people are going to report a sick chicken?I've had sick birds before,sometimes antibiotics will pull them out of it,but not always.I'm not going to drive to the health dept. with a dead bird and no one I know would either.Plus anyone who feeds wild birds would catch any avian virus.
If pidgeons carried it most big cities would quickly be infected, viral carrier pidgeons.

Bird flu is not the path, but it would be easy to do.

It is so easy it happens in nature. The 1918 Flu killed 50,000,000. From healthy to dead in twelve hours, no treatment would work. By the time symptoms show, the damage has been done.

There is a real reason millions of chickens are killed, it is just a matter of time.

Second problem, of our making, disinfectant soaps, and drugs in the sewer. Kills some, the survivors become resistant. The last cases of flesh eating bacteria, from rivers. It used to only show up in hospitals.

Third problem, clean children living in filtered air, do not develop resistance.

There are things worse than you can think of. Possible no survivors, no one immune. The 1918 Flu killed young people, old people who had other flus were immune.

Here at the bottom of the flyway, West Nile, Equine Encefalitus, are becoming common, and with warming, Dengue is moving north. Hanta virus in the west does not kill its mouse host, just humans who come in contact with feces.

Where treatment is no longer possible only containment works, like Andromida Strain, kill them and burn the bodies.

It seems we killed off the good bacteria that were keeping the bad ones down.

Welcome to evolution!

^as a treatment against bacteria, phages can help - but phages which have co-evolved with a specific bacterial host generally don't wipe out 100% of that host, just like bacteria or viruses which co-evolve with humans don't generally wipe out 100% of the humans. There have to be enough survivors to re-infect, and either carriers amongs the population or a reservoir of the pathogen in the environment.

In other words, phages can help a human combat a bacterial infection, but they cannot eliminate it.

Wrt. engineering a superbug: yes, surprisingly easy. Easier even than that to just to ferment up some non-engineered pathogens - wouldn't be "weaponized," but still could do some damage. Available in the environment. Could be done with ordinary household supplies (though not very safely for the creator).

One would have thought something like this was beyond the pale, but one would have thought that shooting a bunch of kindergarteners would be as well. The things preventing it from happening are that terrorists are science-phobic (not tech-phobic, but science-phobic: and biology study tends to turn out athesits), and that the work required might be more thinking and contemplation that a crazed gunman is capable of.