One of Two Hotly Debated Avian Flu Papers Finally Published 52
daveschroeder writes "After a marathon debate over a pair of studies that show how the avian H5N1 influenza virus could become transmissible in mammals, and an unprecedented recommendation by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) to block publication, and its subsequent reversal, a study by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin–Madison was finally and fully published today. 'Experimental adaptation of an influenza H5 HA confers respiratory droplet transmission to a reassortant H5 HA/H1N1 virus in ferrets' appears in the journal Nature."
Death (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't want to sound fatalistic, but one day or another one of those guys makes a mistake and then 90% percent of mankind is going to die.
Re:Death (Score:5, Insightful)
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I hate to break it to you but 100% of mankind is going to die... ...eventually. Not all at once we hope.
We're constantly flirting with extinction (Score:5, Insightful)
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Crap. We never had enough nukes to "wipe out all life on the planet fairly effectively". In fact I very much doubt that we ever had enough nukes to do any more than set back human civilization more than a century or so.
Just give a citation instead of this alarmist crap. You probably also think CO2 will "end civilization" which i would look up except you hide behind the "anonymous coward" nom de plume.
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Apparently not. [informatio...utiful.net] Of course, that link ignores nuclear winter [wikipedia.org], which would do sufficient damage to Earth's ecosystem to most likely wipe out humanity along with most other species, although some very radiation-hardened otherwise hardy life would probably survive.
The Criticism and debate [wikipedia.org] section is the most interesting part...
My generation was brought up with the common knowledge that there were enough nukes to destroy all life on the planet many times over, and that the radiation of a nuclear blast would make a spot uninhabitable for thousands of years.
I remember how shocked and surprised I was as a teenager (don't laugh, there were no discovery channel, google or wikipedia) when I learned that neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki are abandoned lifeless nuclear wasteland
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In all fairness, though, the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombs (terrible though they were) were relatively small atomic devices, not the much larger nuclear weapons that still number in the thousands today.
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Actually nuclear winter is far from proven. Your own wiki link talks about all the conflicting computer models. One computer model assumption would result in a nuclear winter. Another would result in only very temporary local cooling only at the bomb sites. The actual bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as evidence from nuclear tests seem to indicate that the climate effects would not be so severe.
With enough ICBMs you could target every major city in the world and reduce the earth's population by 80
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Wouldn't even do that.
The missiles are aimed at something. There won't be time to re-aim them between hostile launch and loss of your missiles.
So, while the USA and Russia might be able to ruin each other, and France and the UK can each pick out a country at random to nuke if they desire, the majority of the world will read about it in the paper the next day.
Or read it real time on Twitter....
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So, while the USA and Russia might be able to ruin each other, and France and the UK can each pick out a country at random to nuke if they desire, the majority of the world will read about it in the paper the next day.
Or read it real time on Twitter....
A localized nuclear exchange of sufficient yield would most likely have a severe impact on the remaining global population.
Scientific American published a (currently pay-walled) article on 2009-12-30 entitled "South Asian Threat? Local Nuclear War = Global Suffering." [scientificamerican.com] Quoting the summary:
Nuclear bombs dropped on cities and industrial areas in a fight between India and Pakistan would start firestorms that would put massive amounts of smoke into the upper atmosphere.
The particles would remain there for years, blocking the sun, making the earth’s surface cold, dark and dry. Agricultural collapse and mass starvation could follow. Hence, global cooling could result from a regional war, not just a conflict between the U.S. and Russia.
Cooling scenarios are based on computer models. But observations of volcanic eruptions, forest fire smoke and other phenomena provide confidence that the models are correct.
The article is based on a 2007 Rutgers study by the same authors: "Nuclear Winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences." [rutgers.edu]
Three additional papers on these impl
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So in other words, we should nuke some place to turn back global warming? ;)
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It would end civilization as we know it. But there would still be patches of families and clans roaming about even if they're reduced to a nomadic lifestyle.
More like elevated to.
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The problem with the "enough nukes to end all life on earth" argument is than it assumes we set out to carpet-bomb the planet, which is almost certainly not what would happen. The actual plan would be to simultaneously fire enough nukes at each important target to vaporize it several times over in the hopes that enough missiles would get past your enemy's defenses to at least cripple it. The worst-case scenario would be both sides defenses crumble under the onslaught and the targets (at a guess? all major
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I'm sorry, what's that? Cuban MISSILE crisis? Humanity has been flirting with it's own extinction through science for quite a while now? We still have enough nukes to destroy the world several times over, and this virus hasn't even been created yet?
Well, I mean, still, DEADLY DISEASES, we've never played around with that before, that's unique! What are we thinking?
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And a naturally-occurring disease like Ebola could get into a major international airport and have much the same effect?
We now have a pretty effective Ebola vaccine [sciencedaily.com] and even before the vaccine the virus just wasn't all that contagious. People sick with the disease have traveled in crowded cities and crowded aircraft without a single recorded case of transmission.
Ebola is a very nasty disease if you haven't had the vaccine and certain varieties have very high mortality rates, but all of the outbreaks have been self-limiting and there haven't been any confirmed cases of airborne transmission of any of the strains that affect h
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I don't want to sound fatalistic, but one day or another one of those guys makes a mistake and then 90% percent of mankind is going to die.
On the bright side, Al Gore will finally be correct. The debate regarding AWG will truly be over...
Among the remaining 10% of the population. Nature will have shown us it's solution. Not that anyone will be giving it any thought at that point. ;-)
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Nature will have shown us it's solution.
Nature by means of human scientists and genetic engineering?
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AFAICT, this isn't genetic engineering, just old fashioned selective breeding.
And if selective breeding can manage it, it can happen on its own if the proper selection pressure comes into play.
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Yay!!
Re:oh great (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:oh great (Score:5, Funny)
>Solution: don't share saliva with a ferret.
You act like it's so simple.
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How do you avoid being bitten by a drop ferret?
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Easy enough if there's no ferrets around, but if there are all it takes if one ferret-cough to send the virus airborne, and then good luck dodging it.
And the fact that human influenza can jump the species gap is all it needs to be scary, even if the human-fatal ferret flu couldn't. Viruses are way better at sexual reproduction (i.e. recombinant DNA exchange) than anything else on the planet, and influenza has a reputation as one of the more "adventurous" strains. If two or more compatible viruses happen t
hurry up (Score:2)
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To assess whether current control measures may be effective against the H5 transmissible reassortant mutant virus, we examined the reactivity of sera from individuals vaccinated with an H5N1 prototype vaccine38 against a virus possessing the N158D/N224K/Q226L/T318I mutations in HA. We found that pooled human sera from individuals immunized with this vaccine reacted with the virus possessing the mutant H5 HA (N158D/N224K/Q226L/T318I) at a higher titre than with a wild-type H5 HA virus (VN1203/PR8; Supplementary Table 6), indicating that current H5N1 vaccines would be efficacious against the H5 transmissible reassortant mutant virus. In addition, the H5 transmissible reassortant mutant virus (HA(N158D/N224K/Q226L/T318I)/CA04) was highly susceptible to a licensed NA inhibitor, oseltamivir (Supplementary Table 7). These experiments show that appropriate control measures would be available to combat the transmissible virus described in this study.
War on Science? More like Science war on us (Score:3, Funny)
THIS WOULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED UNDER BUSH.
http://classic.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54277/ [the-scientist.com]
Really. It wouldn't have happened. /did I make a funny?
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2010/02/10/obamas-budget-gives-a-boost-to-science- [usnews.com]
But I tought science was already dead (Score:2)
Guess that doing a risk analysis before releasing the papers wasn't the end of the world after all.
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Plese keep in mind that the islamists and their like do not invent a single thing they use to kill others with.
You, sir, have obviously never seen the roadside bombs they place on our convoy routes.
Not that I support their goals, but I do admire the ingenuity of the little goat-fuckers when it comes to building deadly explosives out of trash they've found littered about.
What nobody seems to get (Score:3)
What nobody seems to get is that by suppressing research into viruses and how they spread guarantees that MomNature, when she comes up with one, will make a virus to kill us all while we are standing around unprepared.
MomNature, unlike terrorists, doesn't sleep. Ever. Because evolution, baby.
Sure, use that "Ahmed the Goatfucker Terrorist" bad-movie-plot to justify silencing science. It will eventually come around to bite all of us in the ass.
--
BMO
Suckers (Score:2)
Far too many people have bought into the War on Terror horseshit. There is nothing new here unless you have never in your life visited a scientific library. The stacks are full of the vast body of science, centuries of it. An enormous fraction of can be used for mischief by those who are skilled in the relevant arts. This paper breaks no new ground in that regard, hysterical public hype notwithstanding.
Beware of assuming that pundits or authorities are generally correct or that they have your best interests
Exactly what the Muslims want (Score:2)
90% of an advanced western country killed = collapse of civilisation.
90% of a Muslim country killed as an effect on striking the west = 90% become martyrs (and overtime at Allah's virgin factory)
Resulting chaos, lawlessness, tribes fighting for survival is the environment that cruel elitist beliefs like Islam excel in, this is why they try to overthrow any form of government
If they could do it I am sure they would. In teh aftermath you can be sure that they will be the ones prepared, rounding up the surviv
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Nice troll there. Sorry to the community that I'm feeding you, but I can't just sit there seeing your comment at +2 without pointing a few things out.
I'm an atheist, but I think I wouldn't be if I were born in a Muslim country. There are places in the world where if you're not a Muslim (or a Catholic, etc.) you're a social pariah. Many people have to at least pay lip service to a creed, and even if they would rather become atheist given the freedom of choice, they're not going to alienate themselves from
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As an individual, you want to be judged by your actions as an individual. Please extend the same courtesy to Muslims individually, which means refraining from labeling them collectively as aggressive nut cases bent on world destruction.
But as an individual I also want to be lazy and take easy mental shortcuts to understanding complex situations. How can I do both?!
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You are mostly right.
But.
The sacred text of Christianity is the new testament, which is about the life of Jesus told by his disciples. The sacred text of the Muslims is the Koran (which are Mahommed's recitals of what God said to him in the desert). In addition to the Koran there are books written about Mahommed's life, and Mahommed's did a lot of contentious things (like committing genocide against a Jewish tribe in Medina, or taking a tithe from terrorism, or dealing in slaves).
I am quite sure that lots