Biological Weapons

[Chani]

I just watched a film called WW3, about biological warfare let loose on America, it was ot unlike Outbreak and all others like it.. but frankly it's scared the living sh*t out of me.

I've always been ultra paranoid anyway, but over the past couple of years I've stopped adding fuel to my conspiracy theorist fire so to speak.. probably shouldn't have watched the film then I guess.

Anyway, I was wondering, how likely do you guys think it is that we're all gonna get hit by some incurable highly contagious disease in our lifetime?

Because I think honestly, it's just a disaster waiting to happen. I worked myself up into a total state around 9/11 and was convinced that was going to be how Britain got attacked, particularly when it was revealed that various crop spraying planes had gone missing along with various stockpiles of bio-weapons.

I mean, the people who would attack.. they aren't stupid, they would wait a considerable amount of time before they did anything, just a drop in the water supply, or spray from the air.. just until the government relax....

I could go on for hours and scare myself witless, more so than I am doing right now.. but I just wondered what your thoughts are on the matter....

(by the way, I am aware that I am a very paranoid person!!!)

[Davidu]

WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIEE!!!!!

Well, that's the danger of living in such big, important, super-powers. :P

[GhostHunter]

UK isn't a super power anyone....Rated 27 in the worlds military if I recall correctly. Nonetheless, always a great political ally.

[Egeides]

Chani, I propose you go up to the source. Don't stay with secundary information and go check further. Not wider, FURTHER. And then get your own opinion :)

[Davidu]

And who's the first military power? China or North Lorea? :P

[Dante]

To gauge the threat of a disease, first you must understand them. Diseases (as you should know) are caused in the most part by mirco-organisms, pathogens. These are alive. Now, we take Darwin's theory of evolution, and we find out that since they are alive, they must be evolving. This can be proved, due to the outbreak of previously unknown diseases. AIDS is fairly recent, and though they has been around in many forms, the modern strains of the common cold, influenza, and ebola are very different from their predecessors.

Thus diseases evolve. They evolve to get better. From their point of view this is to infect more, if not to kill more. Diseases will keep evolving forever, getting worse as they do. Not to worry though, so will we. And our immune systems will eventually adapt.

It's modified diseases that we have to be careful of. These are dangerous because we have no time to adapt. On the darker side, it's inevitable given modern technniques that a killer disease will eventually be released. On the bright side however, given the millions of people on the planet, there is bound to be someone with an immune system just right to survive. And that one person might be you.

[Acriku]

Side note, according to the Hardy-Weinberg theorem, it takes more than life for an organism to evolve. To evolve: there is selection; the breeding population is small; mating is nonrandom; there are mutations of the alleles; and differential migration occurs (imm/emmigration). *

*Note: The Hardy-Weinberg theorem describes what conditions must be met for the allele and genotype frequencies to remain constant from generation to generation, I just put the opposite conditions.

Back on topic, it's best to remain calm and orderly. A meteor can come crashing down and killing us all, a nuclear bomb could go off at any moment, a car could come crashing into your house where you sit by the computer, anything can happen. Say cheese. *FLASH!* Remain calm and go about life as orderly as possible. Panic is contagious. I am not a government agent, and you are not paranoid. I was never here, and you were just about to clean the windows. Good day. *clap clap*

[Caid Ivik]

If viruses mutate, we mutate too, that's quite logical. But we won't have the time to make a defense against i.e.botox, which has virtually no safe vaccine and kills in couple of days.

[Anathema]

Somewhat off topic, Russia recently destroyed one percent of their chemical weapons stock. They said that it was enough to kill the population of a medium sized country, so that's a step in the right direction. Disposing of chem weapons is very expensive though.

It's very hard for terrorists to properly use biological weapons. For example, if you spray it from a plane it will disperse to quickly to become harmful. Besides, no terrorist group in the world (not even Al Quada) is known to have acces to them.

Also, there is already a cure for anthrax (Dutch invention :))

[slaphapy]

if that movie scares you you should read the book called The Cobra Event

it's quite a scary book about a terrorist in New York City who makes biological weapons which are probably the most lethal and perfect I have heard of... that the author thought up obviously.

many parts of the story are completely made up, but a lot of it is based on fact.. but it's a fictional story of course.

anywho, the terrorist makes this hugely dangerous virus, called the cobra virus, what he did is take a virus that is only found in caterpillars(sp?) and change the coding so it could be used in humans, mixed that strand with a rhinovirus (common cold causing virus) making it very very contagious, then he mixed it with small pox which makes it spread very fast throughout the body. What the virus does is the caterpillar one makes the person chew uncontrollably, it is the same thing (he says in his book) as i think... lynch-nyan disease (dont' remember, and I don't know if it is a true disease) trying to eat themselves untill finally the brain basically turns into jelly and you die... pretty graphic book as well... but very good :)