Bioweapons: A Real Threat?

GuanYin

Over the last few months the good Mr. Bush (a poet and a visionary) has re-introduced the world to the concept of bioweapons.

For those of you who have repressed the constant media brainwashing on the subject, the idea behind a bioweapon (or so George, the seer and thinker, tells us) is, that it is an infectious agent that infects a population so as to severely reduce (if not eliminate) it, while leaving infrastructure firmly in place. Because its an indiscriminate agent, it would be used with the expectation of civillian casualties. Non infectious bioweapons have been developed and these are more suited to military targets or for assasination attempts.

Now, cheery subject aside, I've met people at conferences who are in volved in areas that *could* conceivably contribute to bioweapons research (although it isn't actually bioweapons research in itself).

These people put forward a very persuasive arguement that bioweapons exist beyond what we imagine, or, at least the science is there so as anyone with a half decent lab and competent scientists could make them.

Despite this, they firmly believe that its not a threat that anyone should be concerned about (mainly cos they'd probably never sleep otherwise). They argue that noone would be foolish enough to release a bioweapon into the population because there is no telling what may happen, besides they would fear that GWB (the bald headed eagle of love) would retaliate. They see a "28 days later" scenario as very unlikely.

Still alot of people are actually worried about this (especially stateside where some companies and institutes actually have response drills for such an attack and I've seen more than a few paranoid boardsters who think the end is nigh.

So I ask, is anyone actually worried?

(wow that was longer than I intended)

Trebor

No

p.pete

Possibly a bit like the guys in the peanut factory who had drilled for the occurence of elephants attacking their factory. Having drilled for what to do, when the elephant(s) did come there was no advance warning system and the elephant was upon them before they knew wtf, ergo the drills rendered useless despite all the practice.

Paranoia is usually misplaced - it's a useful vehicle for the media to focus our minds on things leading us to ignore larger or possibly more relevant dangers.

In America it could be a case of our health care system is crap, I'm cutting taxes for the rich guys (again) and the dollar is going crazy - please ignore all that and concentrate on the evil people roughly half way round the world who you have never met.


Maybe my post is leading this in an unintended direction, but should this be on politics or somewhere like that - obviously there is a case for it here too though (chemicals and all that).

Tails

No im not worried, theres no point worrying about something ive no control over.

by the way sykeirl what do you do?

Capt'n Midnight

Yes they are a threat
No they are not a bigger threat - it's just a political diversion.

During the middle ages they used to catapult infectious material during sieges. The US govenment gave natives blankets infected with smallpox. Japanese scientists who expiremented with anthrax on POW's (including some "sacraficed" for autopsy) were given new jobs while the Admaril Dornitz was prosecuted for war crimes because of U-Boats machine gunning survivors - which was standard practice by US subs against the Japanese.

Infectious agents are generally species specific and if you have a good vaccine it's safe to use on others...

Non-infections agents are like your typical nerve gases and toxins like ricin (so poisonious that a fatal dose is undetectable) -these are less specific and genreally nasty - though some may biodegrade quickly.

The Isrealies were doing some work on an agent that would target genetic differences between them and Arabs- but there just aren't enough differences...

GuanYin

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight
Infectious agents are generally species specific and if you have a good vaccine it's safe to use on others...

Not totally true. Anything used as a bioweapon would most likely render any known vaccine useless.

Eg. Australians managed to put IL10 into mousepox. It turned out to be such a simple process and the effect basically renders any vaccine useless (in mice).

As for species specific, nope thats only really viruses (around which the majority of bioweapons research is based) and even then its not a long leap to "help" a virus jump species if you want it to. Monkey pox has been shown to do this.

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight

Non-infections agents are like your typical nerve gases and toxins like ricin (so poisonious that a fatal dose is undetectable) -these are less specific and genreally nasty - though some may biodegrade quickly.

Chemical weapons are limited, mainly due to the fact that their dispersal rates are inefficient. An interesting point a colleague made about the Ricin attack in Japan was, if it had been biological, it may have taken out half of Tokyo.

GuanYin

Originally posted by Tails
by the way sykeirl what do you do?

Of late all I seem to be doing is going to stupid meetings.

Tails

No sorry i was just wondering, because you seem to be the definitive guide to all things sciencey around here!:)

Capt'n Midnight

The whole point being you can use them against someone else with mnimal impact on your side..

Naturally occuring diseases causing organisms tend to start off evolving as quite lethal since the host may have no defense, to settling down to a level where the host is not incapaciated to an extent that would affect the parasites own survival.

So when a disease jumps species for the first time it can be a lot more dangerous (Aids / Flu / Samonella etc. )

The problem with terrorists / rogue nations using bioweapons is the backlash .. the usual result is more state power... it's been done many times before with other threats. - and the actual deaths caused by demoratic governments far out number deaths caused by terrorists..

The implied threat is causing more deaths than the bioweapons themselves. - unfortunately SARS shows that a more infectious agent would very difficult to contain.



(have a read of H G Wells - tale of things to come)

GuanYin

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight
The whole point being you can use them against someone else with mnimal impact on your side..

This is true, but normal vaccines for say smallpox, shouldn't ever be expected to be effective againts a modified sm\llpox bioweapon. It pretty good bet that the target nation wouldn't have access to the bioweapon vaccine.

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight

Naturally occuring diseases causing organisms tend to start off evolving as quite lethal since the host may have no defense, to settling down to a level where the host is not incapaciated to an extent that would affect the parasites own survival.

Actually this happens in reverse. Naturally occuring disease organisms in virus form will evolve in a receivoir host. That is, a host where the disease lives without causing death. It is not in the interest of a virus to kill a host, seeing as it means the virus may also die. It is usually when the virus jumps species that the problems arise.

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight
The problem with terrorists / rogue nations using bioweapons is the backlash .. the usual result is more state power... it's been done many times before with other threats. - and the actual deaths caused by demoratic governments far out number deaths caused by terrorists.

Well I'd put deaths by dictatorships over that. The big problem with some of the dictator governments and weapons of mass destruction is that you get the feeling they see their own people as acceptable collateral loss.

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight
unfortunately SARS shows that a more infectious agent would very difficult to contain.

Considering there was only one country with fatalities outside of Asia (where public health is lamentable) I think SARS was handled and contained adequately.

GuanYin

Originally posted by Tails
No sorry i was just wondering, because you seem to be the definitive guide to all things sciencey around here!:)

Not really. I haven't got a clue outside of Biology and Medicine.