Is it just me.....
But why do they need to confirm if it is viable smallpox? Surely the best thing to do with anything that says "Smallpox" on it would be to destroy it straight away!
It's a scene reminiscent of Raiders of the Lost Ark's climax: something very dangerous is put in storage by a government agency, and forgotten. America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is working to hose down fears about its control of stockpiles, following the startling discovery of 1950s-era smallpox samples in a …
What if there's an empty space in the box that might have previously contained a vial?
How do you confirm that the vials currently in the box are the vials that are supposed to be in the box?
You need to know that all the vials are there and are the right ones, because if somebody nicked them...
Consider it a serendipitous experiment, but one that could be quite useful. Imagine that they discover some records showing that there was more of it. If they know that the part they have is not viable, then that is a much less serious situation than if they discover it is still viable and some of it is missing.
@DownVotes Are there really people out there that think the US doesn't have stockpiles of smallpox? I suppose you're expecting gifts from Santa this year too, huh?
The story goes that when the WHO arrived to certify all batches destroyed the military simply put them into the canteen fridges for fifteen minutes and them back into their normal lab fridges once the inspectors had gone. Specifically true or not, there's not a chance in hell that the US would really destroy such a potentially powerful weapon.
They have to verify it's real to rule out it being a hilarious prank. A hysterical laughter bomb planted by some long gone researcher who was perfectly content not being there because he knew what would happen, even decades later. Kind of like that guy who made arrangements to have a bunch of harmless, finely ground white plastic powder poured over his body before they closed the casket. With an engraved placard inside that says 'Fuck You grave robber, now you've got Anthrax'. That kind of humor is timeless.
@Risky: "Do you just make this up or to have a set of bookmarks on Area51, Bilderberg, Protocols, Illuminati etc"
How many times do these people have to be caught being totally dishonest evil thugs before you stop believing their bullshit? Have you been asleep for 80 years? We're talking about the only country that has ever used nukes on a (beaten) opponent and who supplied Saddam with chemical and biological weapons for years when they were fighting Iran. When it comes to weapons of mass destruction they have the longest track record of any country in the world!
Why would anyone be so naive as to think they would NOT hold onto smallpox (just as, I'm sure, Russia and China have)? That's the crazy talk.
@Robert Long 1
....and the governement is so good at these secret conspiracies that no-one finds out about. It's so easy as no secrets ever leak do they. Particularly when it will need probably thousands of people that know about it.
Anyway weaponised smallpox? Yeah lets just say it won't be on anywhere you're planning to send in the troops to will it. Biological weapons are't exactly predictable are they?
Hate the US all you like but try and use your brain now and again. That tinfoil isn't helping.
"Yeah lets just say it won't be on anywhere you're planning to send in the troops to will it".
Ever since Vietnam - and even before that - the US government has done everything it possibly can to avoid, or minimize, American casualties. Spreading smallpox would cause terrible harm to the target nation, so there would be no need to send any troops.
Of course, the smallpox would eventually find its way back home. But politicians aren't smart enough to understand that; and besides, it wouldn't happen for weeks, so it would be way over their time horizon.
As incredibly destructive as nuclear weapons eventually became there are a lot of people who see it as a positive thing. Between WWI and the nuclear bombng of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the world had been pouring nearly unlimited resources into chemical and biological weapons research. Nuclear arms didn't stop the research into those things, but it did make them a secondary issue, especially after hydrogen weapons testing began in the USSR.
The world 'chose' nuclear as the vehicle of mass destruction and pretty much everybody except truly mad weapons scientists were pretty happy with that. Everybody was, rightly, afraid of biological weapons. You can't reliably control them once they've been deployed and the capraciousness of the natural world isn't something most people want as the only safeguard between killing the enemy and killing the enemy and everybody on your side as well.
It's all a great big fucked up mess, but I'm glad nuclear was the route we went down.
Specifically true or not, there's not a chance in hell that the US would really destroy such a potentially powerful weapon.
I wouldn't put it past them. These congenital retards regularly mistake a suicide implement for a weapon.
It's like an AI keeping a trick to generate a kernel fault in its drawer, in case it fancied a little bluescreen.
"In September 1978 Janet Parker, a medical photographer at the University of Birmingham, was accidentally infected with smallpox and later died. Her illness was initially diagnosed as a drug rash, but soon afterwards pustules appeared on her body. Mrs Parker's mother also developed smallpox, but survived. The ensuing investigation never established exactly how the smallpox virus had escaped from the university's laboratory."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/smallpox_01.shtml [ near bottom ]
Not just 1950s and 1960s. I sometimes pass the building that was pointed out to me years ago as the lab in question. Makes you think. Try the Wikipedia page and the summary of the Shooter Report if you want nightmares (I live and work in the areas mentioned in the report).
Had that got out it would be a nightmare!
When DNA analysis was done on smallpox it shared more hits with human kind than anything else, Smallpox is our natural predator. We have had 40 years of absence in the most of the world it is uncertain if there is any natural resistance left (maybe some of us who were immunised).
Smallpox has the ability to dismantle our immune system, if it got out in a big city it would be similar to what happened when it landed in the new world :(
I was immunised against smallpox as a baby in the 60's and the vaccination caused terrible eczema (I was covered from head to foot) the vaccination for people susceptible to eczema and asthma is almost as dangerous as catching smallpox itself.
I hope it never gets out as we could not scale up vaccine fast enough. My father who was a medic used to tell of an operation where the patient had smallpox and the theatre staff were unaware. No-one survived exposure even though some were vaccinated as they were exposed to such a high dose of the virus.
The stuff of nightmares :(
I salute your faith in mankind sir. Perhaps I've been too long around the wrong sort, but the only reason I can think of that the average lab worker would voluntarily stay with this and wait is so they can maximize the damage claims in the enormous lawsuit they're about to file. I like your thought much better though.
"I salute your faith in mankind sir. Perhaps I've been too long around the wrong sort, but the only reason I can think of that the average lab worker would voluntarily stay with this and wait is so they can maximize the damage claims in the enormous lawsuit they're about to file. I like your thought much better though."
Actually something like that happened at Los Alamos in an experiment they called "twisting the dragons tail."
The instructors fingers slipped and the 2 sub critical parts came together. He pulled the parts apart with his bare hands.
AFAIK all the other people in the room survived. His death provided the one of the calibrations for radiation exposure.
I'm not sure if he'd deduced that if it went critical there was nowhere to run or if he wanted to just get the two pieces apart and was not thinking that far ahead.
People under pressure can do the most extraordinary things.
Everyone's behavior is predicable (to a certain degree) until they stop being predictable.
Anyone who has ever worked in a Micro lab with a research contingent will be aware of the horrors that lurk in the bottom of freezers, lyophilised sample storage areas etc. One of our virologists (long-retired) spent time in Porton in the late 60s prior to setting up a local lab. When he retired we found cardboard boxes in the freezer that had vials with...crusts.. in them. These had been neatly labelled in fountain pen on lick-and-stick (shudder) labels. The faded-to-illegibility labels were in the bottom of the box....
Anon, well because...
So rummaging through a science lab junk drawer is probably a really bad idea.
Allen key, different allen key, weird flange-thing with a screw in one end that nobody knows it's for, some crusty old AA batteries, vial of disease that could end all life on Earth, tube of superglue welded to the side of the draw, ... used tea bag? Eww, what'd that doing in here?
The original White Horse (which Arthur called the White Hart) is long gone, but the SF meetings that were held there are still happening.
At work a few years ago we found a cardboard box in an old building that contained several small bottles some of which seemed, looking at it from what we hoped was a safe distance, to have broken and the cardboard looked all furry. What was really worrying was the large number of dead insects on and around the box.
Let's hope firstly that there are no more of these little surprises lurking elsewhere, and failing that, hope that the rest turn up before the meaning of 'variola' is lost on the young team tasked with turfing out garbage from the back of storage room Z9. "I thought it was OK, boss, because it didn't have a ☣, or nuffin'". [1]
[1] Biohazard symbol developed in 1966-7, I find, though I'm sure I remember reading about it as being a novelty in the early seventies.
What is quite concerning is that dried viruses are sometimes still viable by aerosolization or just rubbing the container.
Hypothetical doomsday scenario would be someone with a weakened immune system picking up the vial(s), and not noticing the leakage over decades, rubbing their eye/nose/etc. Voila, instant pandemic.
Isn't the incubation period of Variola major about six days?