1918 Flu Virus's Secrets Revealed

[NashVegas]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/5385894.stm

An experiment to reconstruct the deadly 1918 flu virus has given a new insight into how the infection took hold.

Scientists discovered a severe immune system reaction was triggered when mice were infected with the recreated virus.

The US team believe the extreme immune response could have provoked the body to begin killing its own cells, making the flu even deadlier.

The study, published in Nature, may aid the hunt for new treatments. The 1918 pandemic took about 50 million lives.



Any pools to guess how long before this research is militarized?

[soothsayer]

1. No doubt that if we're reading about it, it already has been.

[Sherman A1]

2. Interesting

Yes, I suspect that in some dark corner of a lab the work is being done on that right now. The upside is that work is also being done to understand the virus.

[acmejack]

3. They have RNA sequenced it so militarizing is no problem.

snip>
The virus was recreated from data produced by painstaking research by a team from the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.
snip>
Dr Terrence Tumpey, of the US CDC, defended the decision to recreate the 1918 flu virus.

He said: "We felt we had to recreate the virus and run these experiments to understand the biological properties that made the 1918 virus so exceptionally deadly.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4308872.stm

[cyberpj]

4. I researched this before - Avian Flu and 1918 Virus - What's the truth?

Avian Flu and 1918 Virus - What's the real story? Research or Development?

4 articles follow -

(1) May 2003
The Sunshine Project
US Army Patents Biological Weapons Delivery System, Violates Bioweapons Convention

Austin and Hamburg (8 May 2003) - The United States Army has developed and patented a new grenade that it says can be used to wage biowarfare. This is in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention, which explicitly prohibits development of bioweapons delivery devices.

US Patent #6,523,478, granted on February 25th 2003, covers a "rifle launched non lethal cargo dispenser" that is designed to deliver aerosols, including - according to the patent's claims - "crowd control agents, biological agents, chemical agents..."

The development of biological weapons delivery devices is absolutely prohibited - "in any circumstance" - by Article I of the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, to which the US is a party. There is no exemption from this prohibition, neither for defensive purposes nor for so called non-lethal agents.

"The development of weapons for biological payloads produces great uncertainty about the US commitment to the Biological Weapons Convention." says Edward Hammond of the Sunshine Project US, "Thirty four years after the US renunciation of biological weapons, the Pentagon is back in the bioweapons business."

For more information, please see: http://www.sunshine-project.org
http://www.refuseandresist.org/war/art.php?aid=780


(2) October 2003
Lethal Virus from 1918 Genetically Reconstructed
US Army scientists create "Spanish Flu" virus in laboratory - medical benefit questionable

(Austin and Hamburg, 9 October 2003) – The 'Spanish Flu' influenza virus that killed 20-40 million people in 1918 is currently under reconstruction. Several genes of the extraordinarily lethal 1918 flu virus have been isolated and introduced into contemporary flu strains. These proved to be lethal for mice, while virus constructs with genes from a current flu virus types had hardly any effect. These experiments may easily be abused for military purposes, but provide little benefit from a medical or public health point of view.

snip...

Despite the very dangerous nature of the 1918 virus, efforts to reconstruct it started in the mid 1990s, when Dr Jeffrey Taubenberger from the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington DC succeeded in recovering and sequencing fragments of the viral RNA from preserved tissues of 1918 victims.

snip...
But after (partially) unravelling the genetic sequence of the virus, the scientists went a step further and began bringing the Spanish flu back to life. Unnoticed by the public, they succeeded in creating a live virus containing two 1918 genes that proved to be very lethal in animal experiments. This experiment is only one genetic step away from taking the 1918 demon entirely out of the bottle.

http://www.sunshine-project.org/publications/pr/pr091003.html


(3) March 2004
The Next Worst Thing
Is the federal government's expansion of biodefense research paving the way for the bioweapons of the future?
By Michael Scherer

It has been called a modern-day Manhattan Project—a spending spree so vast and rapid that it might change the face of biological science. In the wake of 9/11, the U.S. government is funding a massive new biodefense research effort, redirecting up to $10 billion toward projects related to biological weapons such as anthrax. The Pentagon's budget for chemical and biological defense has doubled; high-security nuclear-weapons labs have begun conducting genetic research on dangerous pathogens; universities are receiving government funding to build high-tech labs equipped to handle deadly infectious organisms; and Fort Detrick, Maryland, once the home of America's secret bioweapons program, is about to break ground on two new high-tech biodefense centers.

snip...

In a little-noticed report released in October, the National Academy of Sciences warned that the government has no mechanism to prevent the "misuse of the tools, technology, or knowledge base of this research enterprise for offensive military or terrorist purposes." The report called for dramatically stepped-up monitoring of federally supported biodefense projects; so far, Congress and the administration have failed to act on those recommendations. Federal anti-terror legislation has focused on limiting access to stockpiles of known bioterrorism agents such as anthrax. But in a world where scientists can create deadly diseases in a test tube, says Dr. Ernie Takafuji, acting assistant director of biodefense at the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, that is not enough. "When you come down to it, the threat is not just the organisms," he explains. "The threat is the technologies." The greatest danger, scientists and intelligence officials agree, stems from researchers' increasing ability to alter the genetic codes of viruses and bacteria: The same information can be used either to treat disease or to make new germs— pathogens that could, for example, be designed to evade treatment or to genetically target specific populations.

snip...

In another project that has raised eyebrows among bioweapons experts, a U.S. Army medical scientist in Maryland has been seeking to bring back to life key parts of the 1918 Spanish flu, a lethal influenza virus that killed 40 million people worldwide. While such research could be immensely valuable in fighting another deadly flu outbreak, it might also be used to create such an outbreak, notes Ed Hammond, director of the Sunshine Project, a group critical of American biodefense spending. "If worked in a Chinese, Russian, or Iranian laboratory," he says, "his work might well be seen as the 'smoking gun' of a bio-warfare program."

Even more worrisome to many experts is the apparent growth in secretive, or "black box," biodefense research by the U.S. intelligence community. "There's all kinds of secret research going on right now," says Matthew Meselson, a Harvard biologist who has worked closely with the military. "The more you create secret research in biology," he warns, "the more you create risk." One program that has become public is Project Jefferson, a Pentagon effort to genetically engineer a vaccine-resistant version of anthrax.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2004/03/02_400.html


(4) October 2005
Deadly 1918 Epidemic Linked to Bird Flu, Scientists Say
By Gina Kolata

Two teams of federal and university scientists announced today that they had resurrected the 1918 influenza virus, the cause of one of history's most deadly epidemics, and had found that unlike the viruses that caused more recent flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968, the 1918 virus was actually a bird flu that jumped directly to humans.

snip...

Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, deplored the publication of the viral gene sequence and the reconstruction of the virus. "There is a risk verging on inevitability of accidental release of the virus and a risk verging on inevitability of deliberate release," he said. And the 1918 flu virus, Dr. Ebright added, "is perhaps the most effective bioweapons agent ever known."

snip...

"Now you have all these viruses going around and we don't know, Is it going to adapt to humans? Is it going to cause a pandemic? We don't understand the rules," Dr. Taubenberger said. "There is a lot of science to go."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/05/health/05cnd-flu.html?ei=5094&en=054b7bbcd1082219&hp=&ex=1128571200&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print

[JPZenger]

5. Never Knew Why it Started or Why It Stopped

That flu epidemic has been one of the great mysteries of science. In the past, no one could determine how that flu started or why the deaths suddenly stopped. Then, a couple years ago, they unearthed a flu victim's frozen body in Alaska and were able to study the flu.

[TheWraith]

7. I believe the running theory about the end of the pandemic

At least prior to having a research model to deal with, is that it simply ran out of victims. In effect, everyone who it could affect or kill, it had already done so, leaving it no more hosts.

If this theory is accurate, it could actually mean that we're much more resistant to such a disease now, by virtue of inherited immunity and genetic predisposition. Three generations have passed, but we're all still descended from people who survived, either by not getting sick or by fending off the virus.

[olddad56]

6. Okay, another weapon of mass destruction in the Bush arsenal.

[lovuian]

8. Quarantining stops it

its an ineffectual killer... People know how to deal with these viruses

[dkofos]

9. Tell that to the 20,000 + who die of flu related illness every year

[Orangeone]

11. The Flu

would be hard to quarantine because you are contagious before you have any symptoms.

[Lisa]

10. that makes a lot of sense -- a lot of young and healthy people died

The very group that would be expected to have strong immune systems. The result was a W-shaped rather than a U-shaped graph, when plotting ages and mortality rates (a peak in the middle as well as at the ends). I seem to recall a similar pattern for hantavirus (documented historically too, by the native tribes who'd observed that "the strongest people would be taken).