GATTACA:
16 November 2009
By Steven JamesSince the outbreak of swine flu during the winter in the Southern Hemisphere, officials world wide have been seeking clues from there to deal with its likely return to the Northern Hemisphere during our winter months.
Swine flu has become the first real test for the World Health Organization's pandemic alert system when it emerged earlier this year. Although much about the virus remains unknown, experts say this outbreak has revealed several weaknesses in the world’s ability to respond to the sudden emergence of a widespread disease.
How has swine flu progressed in reality compared with expectations.
Swine flu has not disappointed us at all. It's now in virtually every country of the world and managed to make that move in just a matter of a couple of months. After six weeks or so, it became evident that overall, the affects of the pandemic in populations were moderate, and in general no more severe than a seasonal flu.
So why did officials and world media agency's fabricate such hysteria, the answer is complex and sinister in nature.In the first six to nine months of a new pandemic period, the vaccine companies of the world, which are located in nine countries, the United States, Canada, five countries in Western Europe, Australia, and Japan would collectively be able to produce enough vaccine to be able to vaccinate about 840 million people.
We might be able to stretch that out to one billion or 1.1 billion, but you can see that is not near meeting the vaccine needs for several billion more people.
These vaccine producing countries, have 750 million people. And if everyone of their citizens receives a vaccine, there will be little left over for other countries.
Those other countries include Spain, Sweden, along with Finland. They include the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and certainly they include the vast populations that live in South and Southeast Asia and sub Saharan Africa.
Those countries are going to be left with little to no vaccine, and if they get it at all they are going to get it far to late.
In the last several decades, the world has witnessed an information explosion in the life sciences based on an understanding of genes and how they work.
Practical applications of this new and expanding knowledge base will accelerate dramatically and unpredictably.
Growing understanding of the intricate biochemical pathways that underlie life processes has the potential to enable a class of new, more virulent biological agents engineered to attack distinct biochemical pathways and evoke specific affects.
The same science that may cure some of our worst diseases could be used to create the world's most horrifying weapons.
A panel of life science experts convened for the Strategic Assessments Group by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that advances in biotechnology, coupled with the difficulty in detecting nefarious biological activity, have the potential to create a much more dangerous biological warfare threat.
The affects of some of these engineered biological agents could be worse than any disease known to man.
The genome revolution is pushing biotechnology into an explosive growth phase.
Panelists asserted that the resulting wave front of knowledge will evolve rapidly and be so broad, complex, and widely available to the public that traditional intelligence means for monitoring WMD development could prove inadequate to deal with the threat from these advanced biological weapons.
Detection of related activities, particularly the development of novel bioengineered pathogens, will depend increasingly on more specific human intelligence and, argued panelists, will require a closer and perhaps qualitatively different working relationship among the intelligence and biological sciences communities.
The know how to develop some of these weapons already exists. For example, Australian researchers recently inadvertently showed that the virulence of mousepox virus can be significantly embellished by the incorporation of a standard immunoregulator gene, a technique that could be applied to other naturally occurring pathogens such as anthrax or smallpox, greatly increasing their lethality.
Indeed, other biologists have synthesized a key smallpox viral protein and shown its effectiveness in blocking critical aspects of the human immune response.
According to the life scientists convened, other classes of unconventional pathogens that may arise over the next decade and beyond include binary agents that only become effective when two components are combined (a particularly insidious example would be a mild pathogen that when combined with its antidote becomes virulent).
Designer agents created to be antibiotic resistant or to evade an immune response, weaponized gene therapy vectors that affect permanent change in the victim's genetic makeup, or a virus, which could lie dormant inside the victim for an extended period before being triggered.
For example, one panelist cited the possibility of a stealth virus attack that could cripple a large portion of people in their forties with severe arthritis, concealing its hostile origin and leaving a country with massive health and economic problems.
One of the greatest worries for the 21st century is that technological advances will shift the battlefield in favour of effectively anonymous combatants. Such attackers may not even choose to operate as terrorists because death rather than terror may be their core objective.
This trend could run so far that civilization will be very difficult or perhaps even impossible to defend.
This threat looks set to grow larger with time. The more that biological science and biotechnology advance the easier it will be to modify pathogens to make them more lethal and to create delivery systems that are more effective at getting pathogens into humans and into agricultural plants and livestock. Technology makes things easier to do. The problem is that the ability to attack may well advance more rapidly than the ability to defend.
If anonymous assailants unleash their bioengineered pathogens, only the nations with the capability to produce vaccines and to mount an effective health campaign will survive.
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