Chinese researchers creating new strains of influenza virus in veterinary lab

Read that as well, all for research and the betterment of all no doubt....

 

Apparently the one child per couple policy is not working. Gotta depopulate the country somehow. Who cares it if depopulates the rest of the world as well? They don't live there...

 

You guys are kidding right? Seriously, where else do you think this "new strain every year" is coming from? Evolution is one thing but evolving and mutating SO FAST and SO MUCH that the vaccine from the previous year is completely useless within 12 months? I don't think so.

On a related note, does anyone find it ironic that the government is STILL including H1N1 vaccine (originally found in 2009...4 years ago) in the CURRENT/2013 flu vaccine, yet vaccines aren't good for strains from year to year...

If I drop off the face of the earth and nobody hears from me after a couple of days, you'll know it's because I've finally outed something/someone that shouldn't have been outed.

 

*facepalm*

 

Lab Revives History's Deadliest Flu Virus
Scientists blast 'crazy' pandemic experiments
Posted Jun 12, 2014 4:52 AM CDT

Researchers in a Wisconsin lab have created a mutant, highly infectious version of the "Spanish Flu" that killed around 50 million people in 1918—and if you think that sounds completely insane, there are a lot of scientists who agree with you. The University of Wisconsin researchers argue that their experiments will aid the understanding of the pandemic risk posed by bird flu, but other scientists say it is just too risky. "The work they are doing is absolutely crazy. The whole thing is exceedingly dangerous," a former chief science adviser to the British government tells the Guardian. "Yes, there is a danger, but it's not arising from the viruses out there in the animals, it's arising from the labs of grossly ambitious people."

Lead researcher Yoshihiro Kawaoka—who resumed his work in 2012 after a moratorium on genetically engineering flu viruses ended—tweaked bird flu viruses to create a virus very similar to the one that caused the 1918 pandemic, reports NBC. It was then used to infect ferrets, which are the animals most like humans for catching flu. Since bird viruses need only "a few changes to adapt to humans and cause a pandemic, it is important to understand the mechanisms involved in adaptation and identify the key mutations so we can be better prepared," Kawaoka says. But that explanation isn't good enough for those scientists uneasy about the creation of such a deadly virus—and infected ferrets capable of spreading it—even in the safest labs. "I am worried that this signals a growing trend to make transmissible novel viruses willy-nilly, without strong public health rationale," says a Harvard professor of epidemiology, warning that a catastrophic pandemic could result if the virus escaped or was intentionally released.

Lab Revives History's Deadliest Flu Virus - Scientists blast 'crazy' pandemic experiments

 

Oh gee, time for an animal Rights group to raid the lab and set the oppressed rodents free....[sarca]

 

They need to invent a virus that sterilizes evil scientists, bankers, and beliebers.

 

I'm gonna go with the old guy(the former nuclear scientist) on Doomsday Preppers season 1 on this score. "There has never been a time in man's history when he has made a weapon that he hasn't used it." Of course he was talking about nukes, but I think it applies to biological warfare too. Pandemics can be scarier than nuclear war to me, at least to me. One sick person(the patient zero) does not a pandemic make. It's not called a pandemic until AFTER the fact when it's too late. And it's alot easier to carry around small containers of diseases/viruses and release them in population centers than it is nukes. Plus with biological weapons, you have the advantage of getting away before anyone knows what's going on(depending on the incubation period of the strain), and releasing the germs in dozens of places before it's discovered what's going on.

 

What? Did you forget the Black Death itself? plague!

 

I wrote this a while back, seems to fit the thread - virus, the Chinese and what could happen..... This and others are in my "Many Universes of..." book

HEY AMAZON checkers - it is my work...DKR - D K Richardson.....

 

haha I have time for it. If I lock myself in the bathroom.

 

THe trouble is, that fiction is based, at least in part, on working facts of today.

Am I the only one that thinks using **smallpox !!** virus to make some kind of cancer drug is past stupid?

 

Depends on how it works. What happens in the cells. It is possible that something good could be produced. Plague is still studied to see how it kills, what it does. This tells them how to stop it in the fewest moves, the least time, but trying to ride piggyback on any virus without a clear and full understanding of it IS foolish.
Knowledge is power. The power to kill, or the power to stop a killer. Two sides of the same knowledge.