Posted on 07/30/2005 2:07:13 PM PDT by datura
Attempting to wipe out an entire race would be their downfall. We aren't the only country with ICBM's. I would imagine that if that is their plan, they have not thought it fully through.
If it came out that China was doing a little ethnic cleansing with America, our birds would be off in no time at all. If we go down because of China...we will take them down with us.
Do you think China would actually go that route knowing what their ultimate outcome would be?
They needed us only to establish their manufacturing base and modern financial and distribution systems. Whether or not this disease cluster was engineered, China will eventually become fully self sufficient and external trading partners will no longer be an impediment to invading Taiwan or the world.
Faster bioterrorism directive sought
By JEFF NESMITH
Cox News Service
Friday, July 29, 2005
WASHINGTON — The government is moving too slowly to prepare for the possibility that terrorists will attack America with deadly chemicals, diseases or devices that spread radioactive substances, members of a House subcommittee said Thursday.
Congress directed the Department of Homeland Security last year to assess the danger that a wide array of specific biochemical or radiological threats might pose in the hands of terrorists.
But members of a Homeland Security subcommittee examining these threats said determinations have been completed on only four: smallpox, anthrax, botulinum toxin and a radiological or nuclear device.
A declaration by the department that an agent presents a significant threat is supposed to trigger further study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to assess the potential health consequences of the agent and recommend countermeasures to Congress.
John Vitko, director of the chemical and biological countermeasures office at DHS, said the agency expected to have its assessments of 29 agents completed by the end of this year.
"I understand there are 60 potential threats being evaluated," said Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas. "Why have you done only four?"
Vitko said 40 to 50 experts from various disciplines must be consulted in each of four steps the agency follows in identifying the threats and assessing the ability of terrorist groups to use them.
"We are all very concerned about the pace here," McCaul said after the hearing, adding that he is particularly concerned about the deadly Ebola virus, one of the potential biological agents under review. "We need to speed this process up."
McCaul also complained that grants by the Department of Health and Human Services to support fire departments, police, hospitals and other "first responders" in case of a terrorist attack are being distributed under a formula that short changes the largest states.
"In Texas, we're always dead last on a per capita basis in these kind of grants, along with New York and California," he said.
McCaul and others urged Vitko to step up the pace of the assessments.
He said the grants should be targeted to areas of greatest risk.
Asked by Rep. John Linder, R-Ga., chairman of the subcommittee, if terrorists could use the H5N1 avian influenza virus as a biological weapon, Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the CDC, said that might be possible, since influenza can easily be genetically engineered and spreads very rapidly.
"But in this case, Mother Nature herself is a very effective terrorist," she added, referring to the fear by many health experts that the "bird flu" now circulating in Asia will evolve into a human disease and cause a pandemic that could kill millions of people.
Gerberding and Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, were asked by Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., if scientists could engineer a disease that might kill everyone on Earth.
Shays said that before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a medical scientist testified before another House committee that his greatest fear was that "small group of dedicated scientists could create an altered biological agent that could wipe out humanity as we know it."
"Is that something that concerns you?" Shays asked Gerberding and Fauci.
"You're asking us to imagine the unimaginable," Gerberding replied, adding that the "technical obstacles are relatively trivial."
What would be hard, she said, would be to distribute the engineered microbe in a way "that would bypass our capacity to recognize it and intervene effectively."
But she added: "These are things that we as federal agencies ought to and are imagining all the time . . . to try to stay one step ahead of terrorists in this regard."
Fauci said that although "you can do almost anything with a microbe," it would be "very, very difficult to do that, extremely difficult even in the best laboratories."
He said if a microbe is engineered with goals such as making it resistant to vaccines and antiviral or antibiotic medications, the likelihood is that "you mutate it out of existence."
"It's not impossible, but very, very difficult," he said.
Jeff Nesmith's e-mail address is jeffn(at)coxnews.com
Could the ChiComs possibly be betting the farm on sheer population sizes here? Try to imagine our economy with a 40-70% death rate. They have an essentially new military, that is isolated from the masses in China - keeping them protected as a group.
Once the infection hit here, we'd have mass panic, quarantine, some anarchy. I don't know how far that anarchy would go. We'd fight quarantine - since being quarantined we'd have to trust our keepers to not just turn to the "final solution". I know I'd fight it.
Russia would be decimated, since this is already there, and they've got negative population growth big time already.
India's health care system would be overwhelmed - to say the least. They'd lose at least 70%.
Is the CCP willing to gamble on this - now??? Their window of vulnerability will be closing for nuclear attack once our missile defense is online.
Damn. Thanks for posting that.
That is a hereditary disease, not infectious. However, the mutation that causes it does grant an ethnicity specific immunity/resistance to malaria. There are a number of ethnicity specific hereditary diseases that confer protection from other diseases that are bad for the host if they get the genes from both parents, but beneficial if they get it from only one.
Another example of this is Tay-Sachs hereditary disease common to eastern European Ashkenazi Jews. A single copy of that mutation will give immunity against TB, but two copies will kill you.
Many other hereditary mutations that protect against infectious disease cause no hereditary diseases on their own, but they are less well-known primarily because there is no nasty side-effects to highlight the existence of an interesting mutation. Hereditary diseases like Sickle Cell Anemia would normally be bred out of a population if it was not for the fact that at some point the mutation also greatly enhanced survivability of the person carrying it.
ping
If history tells me anything it's not to murder the people who grow your food. When the Soviet Union took control of the farming in Russia, they called the co-ops I think. The Russians nearly starved to death.
Whether or not this disease cluster was engineered, China will eventually become fully self sufficient and external trading partners will no longer be an impediment to invading Taiwan or the world.
They can be self-sufficent till the cows come home, but, without someone to buy their goods...they have no money to further their goal. Should we fall either through ethnic cleansing or an economic collapse...they will too.
The US is simply too genetically diverse, buttressed by a strong northern European genetic component. Anything that is strong enough to hit a 40% death rate in the US will also be strong enough to sweep through China.
Also, China is a filthy and crowded third-world country with very marginal sanitation and an economy that is FAR more dependent on human labor and interaction than the US is. The transmission paths will be much denser and quicker in China than in the US, and they would have to squash a much bigger part of their economy to have a prayer of containing it.
Remember the rash of biologists that died in mysterious ways right before the war in Iraq? That was post SARS, pre-Marburg.
Once the cave was discovered as the source of Ebola, and elephants as the reservoir, China has Ebola.
H5N1 and this strain of Ebola have a noticeable discontinuity in their sequencing, according to the source article. That says to me "splicing".
You are obviously trained in this field - I'm certainly not - so I'd appreciate your educated opinion: Is this "new" strain natural or manmade?
I agree wholeheartedly.
It's been proven to be spliced?
I guess I should ask also if this doesn't sound like something that simply got out of the lab by accident. Knowing the ChiCom level of quality control (no matter what you're talking about), Class 3 or above biofacilities in China would no doubt scare the Hell out of an American scientist.
So were a lab worker to take the disease home, or even a test animal were to escape, eventually the situation could look just like it does now.
Am I right?
Might have to break out the original Weapon of Mass Destruction, the old Daisy BB Gun, or air rifle for the truly sophisticated.
Recall the SARS episode where the Chinese seemed to be getting hit pretty hard? There appeared to be a correlation to a receptor site that was homozygous dominant in most Chinese. A heterozygous individual had a much lower binding affinity. A small group from the Caucasus region are homozygous recessive for the site and can't be infected. They are also immune to to infection by Yersinia Pestia (Black Plague).
I have no doubt that bioweapons are being designed with higher probabilities of nailing specific ethnic groups in higher numbers. It would be next to impossible to guarantee precise specificity with all the mixing of various populations.
A lack of genetic diversity within a population opens the door to targeted genetic attacks. The observed value of hybrid vigor in plants has some general application to animals too.
Just heard a report this morning on KNAU (NPR affiliate at Northern Arizona U, Flagstaff) that H5N1 has popped up in Novisibirsk, Siberia. The vector has not been verified, but Novosibirsk is on a migratory bird route.
"There are 2 reasons for doing so. First, to reduce panic among the people should it ever leak. And second, the Ebola virus has evolved in China. Re-combination has been detected. Most prominently at the portion which determines its effect on humans (very technical description, I can't describe it. sorry.). Also, abrupt breaks in the sequencing were detected,
Oh crap.
Please, it is naive to think that a country can not engage in world war without simultaneously engaging in international trade. The trade occurs beforehand, in preparation for the war effort.
Civilian manufacturing would be redirected to war production similar to the WWII effort here. Lack of natural resources including petroleum would be an impediment to certain countries, but not China for a period of several months, once all civilian uses were restricted.
Once again, I am not arguing that this swine "flu" outbreak is bio-engineered. However, it is mysterious from a technical point of view and the Chinese government behavior is extraordinarily obfuscatory, even compared to the SARS situation. Whether or not the swine disease has military origins, I believe the Chinese would be willing to sacrifice a major fraction of their population in an assault on Taiwan and the west.
I agree that the Chinese Communist system would be unlikely to defeat the west, whether or not international trade is a factor. However, if the Chinese mounted a full war effort, many of us would be dead and those Americans surviving would find their lives greatly changed.
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