

Should Smallpox Be Put To Death? - davi
http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2011/05/12/traffic_carl_zimmer_and_richar.html

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nagrom
The question is unnecessarily emotional and anthropomorphizes smallpox -
smallpox hates that. The question is really "There is a threat contained in
labs in the US and Russia. Should we eliminate it, or hold onto it for future
research and as a backup for vaccinations in case of other, undeclared
stocks?" This breaks down into a whole set of questions, I guess.

What is the probability of the virus escaping from the labs in Georgia and
Siberia? What is the probability that there are undeclared stocks of the virus
elsewhere? If the second is greater than the first, don't destroy the stocks
because you may need them to recreate the vaccine. If the second is less than
the first, by how much? And what is the consensus on risk appetite? How well
can you ensure that the stocks really are destroyed if they are so ordered to
be?

This should tell you the best answer based on safety.

The next set of questions relate to what can be learned from the current
stocks. Is there an active research program? Is there a current list of things
to learn, or are we just holding onto it 'in case'? Has there been a case that
we were glad to have virus stocks that were previously held to be useless?

If there is no obvious gain from holding onto the stock for research and the
most significant threat from the virus is accidental release, then destroy the
stocks. Otherwise, hold onto them - you can't recreate the stocks from nothing
yet and you can always destroy them later.

My gut tells me that we should hold onto them. I'm always loathe to throw
opportunities away and that's really what these stocks represent.

~~~
araneae
Agreed. I actually met a guy a week ago that's working on monkey pox- the next
big pox threat. He told me that it's a growing problem and more people are
getting infected by it in Africa- larger than what would be explained by the
fact that people have stopped vaccinating for small pox. It suggests that
monkey pox is an "up and coming" virus. So there's active research on pox, and
it's silly to simple throw it away.

The probability of the CDC's stock escaping is really very small, and let's
face it, if we got rid of it once we could get rid of it again.

~~~
state_machine
It was probably easier to get rid the first time than it would be a second
time given the increase in air travel and density in population centers that
has occurred since then.

~~~
bhickey
Smallpox is "easy" to get rid of because it's visible. The infected present
with lesions. It also isn't contagious while it incubates.

Contrast this with polio, where there are about a thousand infections per
every paralysis. Thanks to a couple of ignorant leaders who claimed that the
polio vaccine is a Western conspiracy to sterilize African girls, it's
spreading again. Great.

------
giardini
The Soviet Union had tons of biological weapons, including smallpox, before,
during and after the implementation of the Biological Weapons Convention
treaty. People who worked in those laboratories and the associated germ
warfare production facilities sometimes accidentally carried product home
unwittingly, with predictable consequences.

Any hope for eradication is lost when somewhere, somehow, an as-yet-unopened
bottle of bad stuff remains forgotten or hidden. And this is without
considering bad intent.

So keep samples where you can get them quickly.

------
gwern
A much better essay arguing that smallpox be preserved:
<http://www.cdc.gov/eid/content/17/4/681.htm>

------
motters
Probably it's a good idea to get rid of any remaining smallpox samples, but to
retain its DNA/RNA sequence for possible future study. The genomes for viruses
are typically not very large. If you printed out HIV it's maybe a couple of
sheets of A4 paper.

~~~
bhickey
Smallpox is a weird virus.

A couple years ago I asked Tom Knight about the risk of someone ordering
Smallpox oligos and making a viable virus. The problem is that it needs its
own proteins to replicate. In other viruses it's sufficient to heat-shock the
genome into the host. If we destroyed the viral stocks, it would be really
hard to recover.

Nasty freaking virus, but I don't think destroying it is smart. I bet you
could bring the risk of an outbreak close to zero just by vaccinating everyone
who works with the virus and everyone that they live or work with. I suspect
that this is already standard operating procedure.

Also, HIV is really tiny.

~~~
djacobs
I'd say the possibility of recreating smallpox from custom oligos hinges on
this: Is RNA polymerase one of the proteins that smallpox requires from its
own genes, or would someone be able to use stock bacterial polymerases to
recreate its full suite of proteins?

------
flipp
Isn't there way more deadly and virulent stuff locked up in labs all over the
world, like ebola and anthrax and VX? And we don't know what medical
discoveries smallpox might yield decades down the road. Let's not destroy
anything.

~~~
nagrom
Ebola's not that deadly, because it kills people too quickly and the
transmission process is difficult. It's easily quarantined and therefore
deadly to individuals, but not to populations. Smallpox is almost the opposite
- 66% of victims survive, but it spreads very easily.

Anthrax is naturally-occurring, I think and also not that deadly in the scheme
of things - it doesn't spread very easily from infected to non-infected
without being weaponized.

~~~
corin_
Your point is completely valid, but I have to point out how wonderful what you
said sounds out of context.

    
    
      Ebola's not that deadly, because it kills people too quickly

------
daimyoyo
It should be preserved. The reason why is that you will never be able to say
with 100% certainty that the disease is eradicated. So should someone get a
hold of smallpox we'll be able to begin making a vaccine much sooner than we
could of if we had to get a new sample.

~~~
sanxiyn
Smallpox is a special case because we don't need smallpox to make smallpox
vaccine. Smallpox vaccine is made from cowpox.

~~~
joelthelion
Is that really still the case today?

------
sunstone
Another way to look at this question is: If it didn't exist should we create
it?

------
pstack
Earth could be invaded by aliens, someday, and find ourselves unable to
overthrow them. We may find that they are not susceptible to any of our
biological options, either. We may start wishing that we had something like
small-pox to unleash on their home-world. Not something we'd want to do
lightly, but if they assert themselves as our overlords, we may have no other
choice.

~~~
Jach
Is this an argument that would actually convince you, were you otherwise
undecided? I don't consider the probability of that scenario happening (let
alone succeeding) high enough to even blink at, I'm sure accidental /
malicious release are far more probable, even if they're also not very likely.
"Just in case" can be a valid reason to keep something, but the question is
always "Just in case of _what_?" I think nagrom asks the right questions for
this.

Edit: if you were being sarcastic, sorry, I'll go get an energy drink!

~~~
pstack
I don't see small pox as being unique. If we get rid of it, we need to get rid
of everything else. I think we still keep ebola, for example. Frankly, there
is simply no way of knowing the future (though I agree, there's no way of
ensuring security of samples into the future, either). We worry about
destruction of rainforests, because we have no idea what cures and solutions
we might find in the undiscovered life within that could be lost forever.
Likewise, we simply don't know what today's "horror of horrors" could find
beneficial use, some day.

In the event that we are invaded by aliens, I would count the success of
unleashing small pox on them as being much greater than Jeff Goldblum
infecting them with a virus from his macbook. :P

When it comes down to it, though, I don't think there's a right answer. We
just have to make an educated judgement call. Maybe the kind of judgement call
where we respond to things like "but if we torture people, we can find
terrorists!" with "but that's not the kind of people we are". Maybe we really
do need to be the kind of people who say we're not willing to risk exposing
innocent people to this for some future that we are only guessing about. Or
maybe it's enough to simply map the genome and keep the data on it archived,
while dumping the actual real deal.

~~~
jerf
"Jeff Goldblum infecting them with a virus from his macbook."

Ugh. Citing that does not signal you as knowledgeable about computers, it
signals you as profoundly ignorant. In the _real world_ , viruses for Windows
can and have been served by Unix systems running entirely different
architectures via exploited websites. We don't even have to get into the
theory of the matter, we can demonstrate cross-OS virus transmission in
practice. Bits are, quite profoundly, merely bits. They do not have a Mac or
Windows or Alien color: <http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23>

While I'm _sure_ beyond a shadow of a doubt this was accidental, the idea that
a fundamentally telepathic and possibly hive-mindish species of alien may have
advanced computers and no concept of computer security because they have no
concept or biological possibility of generating a computer hacker is actually
a respectable sci-fi speculative idea.

Keeping around one particular instantiation of a DNA sequence because it might
be useful against a low-probability event isn't useful, because in the grand
space of potential DNA-based solutions to such a problem, the smallpox virus
is vanishingly small and effectively no different from just deciding to hook a
random number generator up to a DNA sequencer, shoving the results into a
virus shell, and hoping for the best.

