what movie does this remind you of?

[loyal1]

And all the possibilities of what could go wrong....

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/health/191418_flu18.html

[odinn7]

Oh yeah...that sounds like a good idea. Just in case there's not enough wrong with the world, let's invite more trouble.

[Dreggen]

(Begins gathering supplies for hermetically sealed bunker)  Sounds like it should go fine.  Nothing to worry about I'm sure.....    I think I'll take a vacation in a week or so to nowhere in particular.  Certainly not to my bunker :-)

[Mr. Hockstatter]

Absolutely nothing can go wrong...

[Susan]

Infecting monkey's with a deadly virus so that it can mutate

brilliant!

[Brother Ragnarok]

If this doesn't result in zombies, then George Bush is a good president.

Quoted directly from the article:  The lack of regulatory protection, he said, stems from the fact that influenza is generally regarded as a fairly routine disease.

"But this organism, the 1918 virus, is something else," Hammond said. "It's very dangerous and easily spread."

He contended that the 1918 virus deserves one of the highest levels of laboratory containment systems, known as Biosafety Level 3 Ag -- so-called because the criteria were set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The only greater level of protection (in which lab workers don self-contained "moon suits" inside a pressurized, air-locked, multilayered lab) is Biosafety Level 4.

WHAT THE f**k?  Does he just not notice what he's saying?  Has no one mentioned to them that this might not be a good idea?  Have any of these people ever watched a movie?



Post Edited (09-22-04 19:12)

[peter johnson]

This stuff was indeed deadlier than the Bubonic Plague.
Bubonic Plague is bacterial -- a good shot of plain Penecillin can still knock it out, as it's never had a chance to mutate defenses against it.
Fortean Times magazine postulated an extraterrestrial origin for the 1918 Flu -- or Spanish Flu, as it was then known.  It allegedly originated in the Phillippines, but was over and above so many known influenzas that it's not clear what strain it would have originated from.
A sidebar:  William S. Burroughs did extensive research on the epidemic, and one thing he discovered was that the most valuable workers/nurses in the Flu wards of 1918-19 were those addicted to morphine and heroin -- apparently something about opiate addiction made it impossible for the virus to gain a foothold in the addicts' systems.
peter johnson/denny crane

[Brother Ragnarok]

Interesting and informative.  Thanks for clearing that up, brother.  Ah, but what about ebola?  True, it hasn't killed 40 million people, but it could...

[peter johnson]

Ebola is impressive and very fast, but needs semi-tropical conditions to thrive.  It would die off very quickly in say, New York City in the Fall or Winter.  Summer might be a problem . . .The Spanish Flu, while having a tropical origin, did very very well in cold climates -- Indeed, it started taking off in cold climates right around the end of World War 1 -- November, 1918.
There was a move afoot a few years back to disinter some of the victims that had died in places like Norway and Greenland, the theory being that the frozen conditions would've preserved the DNA of the virus for study.  Perhaps this is where they got what they're shooting in the monkeys from -- the article doesn't say, does it?
I really agree with the people on this site who say "don't these people ever watch a movie?"  or read a book, for that matter.  The stuff is worse than Smallpox, from what I've read . . .
Anyway, hope it doesn't turn into a bad movie . . .
peter johnson/denny crane

[Susan]

peter johnson wrote:

> the most
> valuable workers/nurses in the Flu wards of 1918-19 were those
> addicted to morphine and heroin -- apparently something about
> opiate addiction made it impossible for the virus to gain a
> foothold in the addicts' systems.
> peter johnson/denny crane


Well that's it, i'm going to stock up just in case ;-)

[Susan]

Btw on Ebola - while it's a scary virus it's not as deadly as it seems. It's not airborne, if it mutated to such it could very well be the scariest thing we've seen. But because of it's nature, it doesn't spread from host to host as easily. "the Hot zone" was pretty frightening in the Reston outbreak and the possibility of it being airbourne

[Kory]

For anyone that wants to get the #*$@ scared out of them, read:

The Hot Zone

I've read it.  Then I read the article you posted.  My first reaction?

NNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Acidburn]

The hot zone was actually one of the first REAL books I ever read.  IT got me addected to reading, I read about two books a month now.  But that book is indeed a scarry one, just the thought of that happening here.....*shiver*

[Yaddo42]

There was an episode of "The American Experience" on PBS a few years ago about the Spanish Flu epidemic, scary stuff. Incidents like seemingly healthy people going to warn others in isolated areas, or even just mail carriers running their routes, infecting the people they went to warn. There were anecdotes about things like this happening when health workers would go to warn a local Indian tribe. The tribe would have even less defense than other people, and they would all be wiped out.

Peter Johnson, the article didn't name where they got the samples from but did say "northern latitudes". So Norway and Greenland seem like possibilities. Alaska and some of the more remote parts of northern Canada would seem likely as well.

There have been a few books out in the past few years about the Spanish Flu pandemic, I heard the author of one on Fresh Air (after that "American Experience" episode I got fairly interested AND freaked out), she said then they were trying to look for usable traces of the virus from the tissue samples of solders who died at the time. She said the military had for years been collecting tissue samples, whenever possible, of soldiers who had died (IIRC only from non-combat injuries, or maybe not) and storing them for research purposes. I'm wondering if this is where the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology mentioned in the article comes in.

Count me in as another one who's freaked out by this news, with the speed of long distance and intercontinental travel these days, if the virus were to get out it could do its damage even quicker.

OTOH, if the heroin/morphine addict thing came into play again, then Keith Richards and Courtney Love should come through okay.

[Susan]

Yaddo42 wrote:
>
> OTOH, if the heroin/morphine addict thing came into play again,
> then Keith Richards and Courtney Love should come through okay.


There's a futuristic post-apocolyptic b-movie. If the only ones who could survive a devastating plague are addicts