Last week, scientists were able to resurrect the virus that caused the 1918 flu epidemic, a disaster that spread worldwide and killed up to 50 million people. Among the more interesting things they found is the fact that the 1918 flu is, like the Avian flu currently causing concern worldwide, a bird flu that mutated and jumped to humans. Not good news in light of current developments out of Asia and Europe.
In today’s Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer makes three observations.
First, it is a scientific achievement of staggering proportions. The Spanish flu has not been seen on this blue planet for 85 years. Its re-creation is a story of enterprise, ingenuity, serendipity, hard work and sheer brilliance.
This much is true. The fact that we were able to do this is, by itself, amazing, but there’s more.
Beyond the brilliance lies the sheer terror. We have brought back to life an agent of near-biblical destruction. It killed more people in six months than were killed in the four years of World War I. It killed more humans than any other disease of similar duration in the history of the world, says Alfred W. Crosby, who wrote a history of the 1918 pandemic. And, notes New Scientist magazine, when the re-created virus was given to mice in heavily quarantined laboratories in Atlanta, it killed the mice more quickly than any other flu virus ever tested .
This is a statement I don’t think any of us can truly comprehend. The industrialized world hasn’t dealt with anything like the 1918 flu in 87 years and, given how more densly populated that world is, one can only think that the impact of a deadly, highly transmittable disease would be even more severe.
[R]esurrection of the virus and publication of its structure open the gates of hell. Anybody, bad guys included, can now create it. Biological knowledge is far easier to acquire for Osama bin Laden and friends than nuclear knowledge. And if you can’t make this stuff yourself, you can simply order up DNA sequences from commercial laboratories around the world that will make it and ship it to you on demand. Taubenberger himself admits that “the technology is available.”
And if the bad guys can’t make the flu themselves, they could try to steal it. That’s not easy. But the incentive to do so from a secure facility could not be greater. Nature, which published the full genome sequence, cites Rutgers bacteriologist Richard Ebright as warning that there is a significant risk “verging on inevitability” of accidental release into the human population or of theft by a “disgruntled, disturbed or extremist laboratory employee.”
Why try to steal loose nukes in Russia? A nuke can only destroy a city. The flu virus, properly evolved, is potentially a destroyer of civilizations.
What a lovely thought on a Friday morning. Along with Smallpox, we can now add the 1918 Flu as one of the possible weapons in the terrorist arsenal. And, unlike smallpox, we wouldn’t even necessarily know we were under attack until it was too late. The flu is the flu and there would be no way, absent on-the-spot genetic testing to know we were dealing with the 1918 virus as opposed to something “normal.”
