UKH

Don't know if this has been discussed before, but there's a scary possibility that Lyme disease spread in the US after releases from a biological warfare programme!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/16/pentagon-review-weaponised-...

Unproven of course, and sounds like fiction, or a dodgy conspiracy theory, but there seems to be some interesting evidence in the book referred to in this article.

Imagine a country with the largest defence budget in the world etc.  They design a biological weapon with an exceptionally low mortality rate, that takes years to kick in? Why? 

When you say evidence, you mean if you remove common sense? 

I have no axe to grind for this particular book. I said the evidence was interesting, not that it proved anything. And you clearly haven't looked at what the US has explored in the search for biological weapons in the past. One of the first things they looked at was the brucella virus, which is also slow to act. Also, let's not forget the US's propensity for exploring all kinds of mad schemes that might yield new weapons - see Jon Ronson's book, 'The Men Who Stare at Goats' for examples. Their giant defence budget actually encourages this kind of exploration.

https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2004/nov/21/politics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb

Those crazy yanks 

Maybe they were not finished developing it? A biological weapon which spreads slowly but with a high fatality rate and plausible natural source might be valuable. Attack and weaken your enemies without drawing attention to yourself?

If they were going to do that, tick-borne encephalitis would be more use.

I guess we've just got to hope that ISIS never discover midges...

That piece that somebody linked to in one of the other tick/Lyme threads which talked about ticks as being 'the Swiss Army knife' of disease vectors had any number of possible disease options!

Reminiscent of current Russian cyber-warfare approaches that are designed to undermine and weaken other states. 

Ebola kills too quickly to be globsl pandemic, but Lyme disease is clearly too slow. 

Why create a new disease. It would be better to cast doubt on existing global vaccination programmes by claiming they contained lead and mercury. Oh hang on minute....

So that's what Nick Cave was singing about...

youtube.com/watch?v=AWKXrYS7MOA&

Respectfully, I have to disagree -- why does this fallacy perpetuate? Ebola doesn't kill that quickly, and dead people are very much infectious. There is an ongoing outbreak threatening to spill out beyond the DRC to Ghana. There is no reason, given the right circumstances why Ebola couldn't become a pandemic (which I define as sustained transmission in two or more continents). Introduction to a series of countries with fragile or low-resourced healthcare infrastructure, which find it hard to stamp out while the outbreak is of a small size, would do it. I'll bet R0 for Ebola in many countries and populations is greater than 1.

Much more plausible!

Uganda (unless you know something not being reported in my news sources?).

I was reading an Economist article on the DRC just last night and it was saying that the outbreak has now reached Goma which means there is a threat that it will spread to Rwanda as well as Goma is a regional hub.

The US is generally a bit strange both in terms of their biological warfare programme and their biological defense programme.  I get some funding from the latter - the grant funds database resources to hold genome information for organisms that the US perceives as a potential threat.  Some of the organisms under their remit just amuse me - I think the funniest is Toxoplasma, which seems to me like it would be a terrible bioweapon.  Most infected individuals live perfectly normal lives without ever knowing they have a chronic asymptomatic infection.  In some parts of the world this is up to 50% of the population.  One is generally infected by eating undercooked meat or fish, drinking unpastuerized milk or coming into contact with cat faeces (often through soil, although your risk obviously increases if you have a pet cat).  Direct human to human transmission can only happen in two ways; when a woman is infected for the first time during pregnancy, the foetus can become infected, and through solid organ transplants.  The parasite needs to infect a cat to complete its lifecycle and is generally transmitted between cats and the animals they predate - infection of humans and other large mammals is only really an accident of proximity.  Admittedly congenital Toxoplasmosis is unpleasant and it can cause problems in the immunocompromised - but generally it seems to me like it would be an incredibly inefficient potential bioweapon that would require some bizarre strategies to spread it and isn't going to make most people sick anyway!

It kills quickly relative to the speed of movement of people there.

Dead people don't board long haul planes flying through international hub airports. 

The right circumstance are more specific and airport screening programmes should pick up cases, if staff read thermometers correctly!

Edit. Of course time will tell and just one unfortunate mutation could change everything. 

Was suggested in one of the 'World War Weird' TV programmes some time ago, at least two years. Very little trace of the programme on Google, though... Hmmm... must be a conspiracy to silence the rumours...

The Brits can hardly talk, releasing man-eating badgers in Basra.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6295138.stm

There was a report done by a group of international experts who found that the US used fleas with the plague and Anthrax dropped over North Korean villages in 1950-1952.

You are correct, my mistake, sorry! WHO have just declared it a global public health emergency, despite the assessment that that spread to other countries is low.

What is that speed? A key knowledge gap is a quantitative understanding of how people in places like DRC and other poorly measured populations actually move about.

They do, but usually in the hold. And people are known to travel quite far to attend funerals. Admittedly the risk is low, but no-one can really say how low. 

I don't agree, and I (respectfully!) refer you to my (peer reviewed) letter in The Lancet on this. 

 Ebola has proven remarkably stable genetically during the 2913-16 epidemic, despite a lot of passage through humans. I'm not sure there is much concern any more that we are a few mutations away from a more transmissible form. 

Edit: missed end of sentence! Doh.

When you 'International Experts', what you actually mean is some anti-western website talking bollocks...

Has anybody seen the reports from USA about people developing allergies to red meat post bites by Lone Star Ticks?

I'm obviously stirring the pot, but hey tin foil hat on.. 

After all America did spent millions trying to turn cats into spy tools.

Which failed miserably, which would be apparent to any that's ever had a cat.

Ah you mean that anyone stating this is anti- western because they tell the truth as opposed to media who don't tell it as being pro-western but anti-truth like they all are? 

You could always provide credible evidence to prove what you are saying is true.
That's the normal way of doing things on UKC and in any other situation where you have stated something controversial as fact and have been challenged on it.

Is it not likely that as standards of living improve so dies speed, in that spread will only get worse, not better? 

Of course and the culture in some places of hugging their dead relative, digging the dead back up etc. Won't help. 

Ok. So my understanding was that for rapid spread a disease needs to contagious at a faster rate than it makes you so unwell you can't travel or has very obvious symptoms? 

Which is pretty good given it's mortality rate. But I suspect you know of other conditions which we should be more concerned about, but never make the press?

Nothing controversial about it as the Chinese and North Korean government (what was left of it) spent a fortune on mass vaccinations at the time because people were dying of disease that had not been seen in North Korea for 500 years. See below. 

https://medium.com/@jeff_kaye/report-u-s-dropped-plague-infected-fleas-on-n...

Is that the only source of evidence that you can find?

I wouldn't get too focused on the absolute speed of spread. HIV is a good example of a slow pandemic, but a pandemic non-the-less, where the pathogen has relatively very slow transmission but a very long infectious period (people are infectious until death) coupled with a long incubation period. Lots of other factors helped HIV get established and persist of course (e.g., healthcare infrastructure, cultural aspects, lack of effective treatment and vaccination). 

From a simplistic mathematical perspective, a pathogen's success in emerging and establishing itself around the world depends on: 

1. incubation period (how long from being infected until the host is infectious) -- often practically defined as the period from likely infection to onset of symptoms. See #3;
2. infectious period (how long the host is contagious) -- can be shortened by effective diagnosis and treatment or isolation;
3. how easy it is to diagnose -- often the only way is through identifying symptoms. A long incubation period (Ebola has a long one for viruses) means that infected hosts can walk straight through even the best border screening;
4. transmission rate -- how contagious the host is when infectous -- depends a lot on the mode of transmission (airborne, droplet, fomite, sexual transmission, vector-borne, etc) and the relevant social mixing characteristics of the host population;
5. human (host) mobility -- the more travel and mixing the easier it is for the pathogen to access susceptible population and individuals 

The ability to control an outbreak often boils down to whether the pathogen makes a host infectious prior to the onset of symptoms (the trigger for a public health intervention, such as treatment of quarantine). There was a nice paper on this a few years ago: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/101/16/6146.full.pdf

Worst case scenario would be a pathogen with hardly any symptoms, a long incubation period, highly transmissible (airborne, so would have to one that invaded the respiratory tract), long infectious period, high fatality rate, and emerging into a mobile, high density population with poor healthcare infrastructure. Thankfully these factors don't seem to occur in pairs let alone the whole deck. But that's a pre-coffee ramble so it's probably all up for argument!

Veering dangerously outside my expertise, avian flu A/H7N9 has been a worry for a number of years, though it appears the Chinese poultry vaccination campaign has succeeded, with the recent exception of a couple of (maybe only one?) human cases popping up. MERS-CoV continues to generate human cases in the Middle East, and as far as I am aware we are no nearer understanding how the animal reservoir is maintained. Ebola is an obvious concern. Chikungunya and Dengue are likely to encroach into new populations thanks to climate change. On the further reaches of the worry radar are: Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, monkeypox (causes occasional small outbreaks in rural population, but has made it to the UK once I think), and the wonderfully named o'nyong'nyong virus from the togavirus family.

Much to consider there. Thanks for the informative replies. Infinitely better than the various conspiracy theories.