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| Great White North | |
| (Canadian) Military intelligence warns that avian flu could be used as weapon | |
| 2005-03-09 | |
TORONTO (CP) - The military's intelligence arm has warned the federal government that avian influenza could be used as a weapon of bioterrorism, a heavily censored report suggests. Unlikely cos once a flu epidemic gets started, deliberately trying to spread it would be like turning on your sprinklers during a hurricane in order to increase flooding. It also reveals that military planners believe a naturally occurring flu pandemic may be imminent. The report, entitled Recent Human Outbreaks of Avian Influenza and Potential Biological Warfare Implications, was obtained under the Access to Information Act by The Canadian Press.
It notes a method called "passaging," while not entirely predictable, could be a "potentially highly effective" way to push a virus to develop virulence. "Such forced antigenic shifts could be attempted in a biological weapons program," says the 15-page report, dated Dec. 8, 2004. Passaging involves the repeated cycling of strains of a virus through generations of a species of animals or through cell culture. The process can be used to either ratchet up or dial down the virulence of a virus, depending on which of the ensuing offspring - the mild or the severe - are selected in each cycle for the next passage. There is debate in the community of infectious disease experts whether influenza would make a good bioterrorism agent. For one thing, once released, the virus would not discriminate between friend or foe. Terrorists and their supporters would be as likely to fall ill and die as those they hoped to target. Just like car bombs. But if the ultimate goal is panic, social disruption and economic losses, influenza would be a good choice, says Dr. Brian Ward, a virologist at McGill University in Montreal. "To me it's one of the most logical viruses to use. It doesn't have to be a really bad one to throw a huge wrench," Ward said. "I mean, if you want to hurt the world's economy, that's an awfully good way." Canada estimates the direct and indirect health-care costs alone of a mild flu pandemic would range from $10 billion to $24 billion. That doesn't start to count societal costs such as lost productivity because of mass illness or the impact on vulnerable industries such as airlines and tourism or the insurance sector that would be hit with business losses and death claims. But influenza expert Dr. Earl Brown suggests that while flu makes a good theoretical bioterror agent, the reality of these "delicate" viruses is that the task would be harder than it appears. "Flu is a wimpy virus, which I think is the one knock against it. It doesn't persist in the environment (outside a human) very long," says Brown, a University of Ottawa scientist who specializes in the evolution of influenza viruses. "You have to infect people sort of straight away, otherwise it's going to die sitting around the environment." Thats true of all/most viruses. Brown, who has done expensive work on reassorting or mating flu viruses, says any virus bred to spread would have to meet several key criteria: it would need to jump the species barrier and have the ability both to transmit easily and cause severe disease if it did. "If you want to see chaos and mayhem and you're not concerned about the backlash, then you just have to get to the biology. And right now nobody can do it," Brown says. Ah, the real expert says it not possible. "There's a good chance that you'd make something that just would burn out. It just wouldn't spread very well." Some filler cut. I suspect the real risk has been censored out so all the journo had to work with was the uncensored stuff on the flu. I've mentioned before (so there is no real harm in repeating it) but if you want a bioweapon to devastate the West then go to China and bribe somone with access to the SARS virus (it would have been fairly easy 2 years ago, I understand much harder today) and infect a dozen people put them on separate planes to your target country and instruct them to ride up and down in elevators in department stores or whereever. | |
| Posted by:phil_b |
| #15 Lift, Lift lobby, the point is it was casual contact in a public place. At its peak there were perhaps 3 dozen active SARS cases in Singapore and two major hospitals were shutdown. It made me realize how easily a healthcare system could be overwhelmed. One major difference between now and 1918 is people have vastly better access to information. Some will stay away from work but I still think the big risk is from sick or worried migrants seeking better healthcare and government inertia in changing how it deals with them, which puts places where developed coutries border undeveloped countries at most risk. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2005-03-09 10:29:04 PM |
| #14 My bad. Of course it's a coronavirus. Brain fart on my part. However... there have only been three flu pandemics since 1900. I'm not at all certain that the cause of the Spanish Flu has been definitively demonstrated. All of the speculation about flu pandemics is based on three recorded occurances, hardly a large data set. I agree, and have said so on my blog, that a pandemic will happen. We just plain don't have enough data to say where or when. Avain flu is just as likely to be another Swine Flu as it is to be a Hong Kong flu. The mortality rate for avain flu is far lower than 72%. As I point out in my blog entry, a 2003 outbreak in the Netherlands, of 89 cases, there were 78 cases of conjunctivitis. In 2004, a Canadian outbreak was limited to eye infections. Remember that mortality in this disease is primarily influenced by the health and economic status of the patient. Many of the people who are dying of this are members of a social and economic class that dies from a lot of diseases. Dr. Niman raises some interesting points. However, we already know that most illnesses vary in the degree of their severity in patients. West Nile, for example, and smallpox. It is not a surprise to find family members testing positive but without reported symptoms. Having to rely on patients to accurately report mild symptoms days or weeks after they happened is one of the bugs in epidemiology. Dr. Niman is correct in questioning the monitoring in non First World nations. I was very critical of the Chinese numbers during the SARS outbreak. Heck, even the American numbers. The problem with all monitoring programs, even the CDC's influenza program, is that it requires patients to be sick enough to need a doctor. Everything after that is an educated guess, but still a guess. For every patient that is identified, how many were not, and to what degree did their illness progress? Another interesting question that Phil raises is the level of illness that causes social breakdown. We have records of the Black Death, and it would be tempting to draw conclusions from that era. In actuality, our society may be complex enough that an incapacitation rate of 10% might be enough to create social breakdown. Or, it could be as high as 50%. Or, depending on the circumstances, it could be the ten people who know how to keep the Northeast power grid up and running. .00000001%, but a vital %. BTW, the SARS elevator thing isn't. The cite says the elevator lobby, and the CDC says: Hong Kong. As of March 25, the Hong Kong Department of Health (DH) reported 290 suspected and probable SARS cases. Beginning on March 11, an increase in acute pneumonia cases among health-care workers (HCWs) at hospital 1 in Hong Kong was reported to DH. Epidemiologic investigation has linked these cases to an index patient (Patient J) who visited a friend in hotel M in late February, became ill a few days later, and was admitted to hospital 1 on March 4 (Figure 1). Patient J visited hotel M while patient A, an ill visitor from Guangdong province, was staying there. |
| Posted by: Chuck Simmins 2005-03-09 8:37:55 PM |
| #13 Have you imman check the duck and you have nothing to worry about Frank. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-03-09 7:55:32 PM |
| #12 this is exactly why I wear a condom when intimate with a duck |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-03-09 7:13:59 PM |
| #11 HV, there is no way to prevent flu infection - immunization/vaccines don't work becuase we can't develop them quickly enough to keep up with the rapidly changing virus. There is no cure for the flu. There is no reliable test that works quickly enough to be clinically useful. So the main way to stop its spread is to isolate infected people. This is only effective when people present with recognizable symptoms. Dr Niman thinks that flu infections result in a wide range of symptoms that are not being recognized as flu and many people have only mild symptoms. I.e. both groups are not being identified and isolated and the virus spreads. Becuase the virus changes so rapidly at any time the relatively benign version changes into the killer version. If enough people are infected with the benign version and not isolated, you will get lethal cases occuring all over and far too many for the isolation regime to be implemented. It will then for all practical purposes infect everyone on the planet. What many people fail to appreciate is fast this will spread. If it is infectious enough and the flu historically is very infectious, most places in the world will have major outbreaks within a matter of weeks. I am deeply sceptical that developed countries (except perhaps islands) can react quickly enough to stop it. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2005-03-09 6:57:00 PM |
| #10 I have been reading Dr. Niman for a while now and I don't understand his logic, other than he thinks a much more aggressive monitoring program is needed. If there are lots of asymptomatic cases, then it's true the virus has spread a lot farther than anyone realizes, but it also means the mortality rate is a lot lower than the 72% that has been publicized. I'm not a doctor, but wouldn't a preponderance of asymptomatic cases also mean that the human immune system has been exposed to the virus before and evolved an immune response to it? |
| Posted by: HV 2005-03-09 6:39:49 PM |
| #9 Here is a source for the HK elevator origin of SARS in Singapore. It also helps explain why asymptomatic spread is the real problem. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2005-03-09 5:36:29 PM |
| #8 Current thinking is the problem could escalate if two viruses infect the same host and interchange their DNA/proteins/whatever, thereby creating a new strain. Apparently, this is one way virals strains change and adapt. On the other hand, the faster a virus kills (or even incapacitates) its host, the smaller the range of infection, as victims die off before they get a chance to spread it around. |
| Posted by: Bobby 2005-03-09 5:28:28 PM |
| #7 Chuck, SARS is caused by a coronavirus. Viruses replicate by a completely different mechanism to bacteria. They change very quickly. Forget what you know about organisms evolving over long periods. It doesn't apply to Viruses. The red flag is asymptomatic spread and I tend to agree with Dr. Niman that this is already occuring and it is too late to stop a pandemic. It remains to be seen if this of 1918/19 severity. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2005-03-09 5:19:18 PM |
| #6 It's better to be a cautious fool than a dead fool, Chuck. |
| Posted by: twobyfour 2005-03-09 4:51:06 PM |
| #5 Phil, Phil, oh, Phil, the United States deals with epidemics every year. Influenza, 200,000 plus hospitializations. West Nile. Lyme Disease. Dengue fever. Plague. HIV. And so on and so on. Smallpox didn't happen. Anthrax didn't kill hundreds. Swine Flu was a bust. Avain flu is the "panic du jour". SARS is believed to be caused by a common bacteria. 21% of the deaths due to SARS were medical professionals. The MD that discovered SARS died of it. About half the Canadian cases were doctors or other medical professionals. If you get sputum in your face from a SARS patient, you stand a decent chance of catching it. Standard universal precautions will prevent this. Just like with Ebola. The region of China where SARS was first isolated is as Third World as anyplace. The Chinese claim 9% fatalities. In First World countries it was more like 14% IT ISN'T THAT CONTAIGIOUS! SARS Info The last influenza pandemic was in the 1980's. About 36,000 died in the U.S., and the CDC believes about 34,000 Americans die of influenza in a typical year. The avain flu has been known since 1997 or so. The vast majority of people who catch it deal directly with chickens and ducks. The number of cases where human to human transmittal can be demonstrated is less than 15, probably less than 10. The vast majority of avain flu cases involve conjunctivitis, a minor eye infection. I won't say never, but rarely does a disease mutate to a deadlier form. That's why syphilis, for example, is far, far less deadly than it was 300 years ago. The same for measles. In the eight years since we identified bird flu, it hasn't gotten deadlier, nor more contaigious. I'd love to see your cite for the Hong Kong elevator story. The woman who was Patient Zero for Canada was sick during her entire trip by plane from China to Toronto and no one on her plane flight caught SARS. Most of the Hong Kong cases were due to a building construction problem where there was a connection between waste water and fresh water in two apartment buildings. It's against code in the U.S., for just that reason. |
| Posted by: Chuck Simmins 2005-03-09 4:43:52 PM |
| #4 phil_b - China makes a move like that during such events and they will appear to be guilty of deliberately spreading the disease in order to take advantage of the chaos, especially if its an Asian strain virus. Truly guilty or not, it would seem to me to be an awful risk on China's part. They wouldn't want to get blamed for the disease (and people will be looking for somebody to blame), especially if it is killing large numbers of Americans. Giving even the appearance of being behind an epidemic is a very dangerous thing. |
| Posted by: Laurence of the Rats 2005-03-09 4:32:05 PM |
| #3 I could paint an extremely scary scenario that has many thousands, perhaps millions on the move fleeing the disease and seeking treatment. These are well documented historical responses to epidemics. Where do you think they will head? Thats right the developed countries. Will border guards shoot to kill people who are just seeking medical help? Becuase that is what is needed. Within a week you would have thousands of sick people. The healthcare system is overwhelmed and shuts down. Within two weeks societies and global communications shutdown as people stay at home and wait for the epidemic to pass. Who knows what will happen then. China sees its opportunity to take back Taiwan? |
| Posted by: phil_b 2005-03-09 4:10:45 PM |
| #2 Chuck, the reason the reason a pandemic is predicted, is every time we get a new H variant of the flu we get a pandemic The bird flu is a new H variant. Viruses evolve very rapidly for reasons that are only partly understood. In a very short period (days) you can get different strains that differ radically in both how infectious they are and how lethal they are. Even with the couple of thousand who got SARS some chains of infection killed a high proportion of those infected and some just gave mild flu like symptoms. Similarly with how infectious they are. One person in a Hong Kong elevator resulted in several hundred people being infected (many through casual contact) and scores of deaths. Viruses are very different to bacteria. You can't make blanket statements about how infectious they are except in an after the fact statistical sense. In my VHO opinion we were lucky that SARS never got into a population where effective disease control measures could not be used (like Africa and large parts of Asia). If it had then it would have been a very different story. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2005-03-09 3:48:10 PM |
| #1 Er... yeah, on chickens. SARS is not that contaigious. It is about as contaigious as Ebola and far less contaigious than smallpox. You have to be exposed to infected body fluids to catch SARS. The bacteria claimed to cause SARS is common, worldwide. Look here on my blog for more info. |
| Posted by: Chuck Simmins 2005-03-09 12:40:59 PM |