She was interviewed on Breaking Points today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvVRnh3JVGQ&list=PLdOud06Yw7...

Funnily enough the reason why virology therapy (something the Soviets did a lot of research in cuz they didn't have good antibiotics and biotech/pharma) hasn't seen much success at scale is precisely because the body's immune system adapts too quickly. Maybe we will see more success now with AI but it will be a cold day in hell before the powers that be let any garage biohacker have access to LLMs trained on this sort of information.

There are some that had been modified to release endorphins!

>"When we first heard Soviet scientists were inserting the endorphin gene [for euphoria] into plague," says Dr. Henry Heine, a former U.S. Army bacteriologist, "we were appalled. That they would purposefully engineer the Y. pestis bacteria to behave this way... to make you want to go out and socialize... this was some horrifying stuff."

> . . .

> Former assistant secretary of defense Andy Weber agrees. "I grew up thinking Reagan’s phrase ‘Evil Empire’ was an exaggeration," he tells us. "Then I learned what the Russians were doing [with biological warfare]." He pauses for effect. "It was evil."

The accounts are from Annie Jacobsen's notes in "Biological War".

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Reddit and Wikipedia are the universe's two most unreliable sources of information, behind somebody's Aunt Linda after a couple glasses of box wine.

Indeed. I wonder how much work it would be to make this antibiotic resistant. Then the Russians develop some bacteriophage that infects and kills the bacteria as their own cure.

The phrase "gain-of-function research" has acquired almost magical properties on the Internet. You can do literally anything you want to a pathogen with it.

> ”Pretty much every modern influenza variant is a derivative of the Spanish flu”

Not really. While it was true for much of the last century that many “seasonal flu” viruses were direct descendents from H1N1 Spanish flu, the H1N1 that caused the 2009 “swine flu” pandemic was a distinct strain combining new genes of pig, avian, and human flu origins. Since then, derivatives of that virus have replaced earlier ones as the most common circulating H1N1 types.

And right now the most common circulating influenza is actually H3N2 from a completely different (avian) lineage with origins in the 1968 pandemic.

Unfortunately, you can force evolution in bacteria, fungi and viruses. There's more than enough examples of multi-resistant pathogens in all three families, especially in hospitals but also around agriculture (because they use stuff meant as a last-resort to promote animal growth or prevent animals from falling ill to the effects of overcrowding)... honestly between these and prions, I often do wonder how long we as humanity will be able to keep both hospitals and large-scale farming in existence.

> Yes, we have modern medicine, but many people reject it

Yea you are definitely right about that. In Africa (specific countries I can’t currently recall) attempts at vaccination programs for example are often met with hostility or suspicion or even some people believing a vaccine causes the disease.

There was also vaccine skepticism during the COVID-19 pandemic in countries like China which refused first-to-market western vaccines out of fear and suspicion. It’s tragic all around.

No pretty sure its the disease that kills people.

You realize life is complex enough that two things can be true, right? That everything isn't either/or?

The reason we've haven't had more outbreaks of more diseases in the last century is because we had a lot of smart vigilant well-resourced people who very much felt the disease was the problem, and took steps to mitigate.

Classic late-stage civilization blunder is taking the fruits of civilization for granted. Sorry you're not aware of those things, but that's on you.

I think you can safely agree that they are not mutually exclusive and both of them are problems. In this particular case, it was a 100% fatality disease in a gain-of-function lab. It is being handled extremely seriously by Russia.

Perhaps the Russian military is overreacting with the blanket quarantines, but the odds are more likely that they understand the nature better than anyone else.

Again, normal pneumonic plague approaches 100% fatality rates. This is potentially a weaponized form.

This is an "oh, fuck" moment.

The bullet is not the problem, the squishy matter people are made of is.

Infection by hantavirus is correlated with where you live, not socioeconomic status. It is endemic to parts of the high desert in the American Southwest and a background risk you accept by living there.

For example, Gene Hackman's wife, Betsy Arakawa, famously died from hantavirus. They lived in a wealthy gated community in Santa Fe.

30 in a population of 350mill is a ~1:10000000 chance of getting it. 900 or so cases in 3 decades. A cursory google search shows it's killed about 300 people since 1990, so roughly 10 a year, the equivalent of venomous snake-related deaths more or less, and that's because we have quick access to anti-venoms for most of the population otherwise the casualties would be far higher.

Treating that low number like a low number is not "discounting" rural US citizens. The US - all populations included - does not really live with the hantavirus in any real sense. It's incredibly rare. 10x as many people are struck by lightening annually in the US.

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Are you seriously accusing an anti-plague institute that works on containing outbreaks of building bio weapons? Maybe try taking the propaganda with a healthy dose of salt

I guess that’s true. I’ve literally had worse but I’m in a small minority so maybe discounting the effect of that experience.

I think it's pretty apparent from the news articles about it. She died of pneumonic plague, which is a fast-moving form of Yersinia Pestis infection that is roughly 100% fatal if first treatment occurs > 24 hours after symptoms start.

Why pneumonic plague? Pneumonic plague is the form of infection that occurs when plague bacteria are inhaled in aerosolized form into the lungs, or when septicemic plague (plague in the bloodstreams) reaches the lungs. Like, for example, when a test tube breaks. Her method of infection was a pretty textbook vector for pneumonic plague. Other cases have been caused when tissue samples of infected rodents have been splayed open, for example, or when blood from an infected person splatters the respiratory tract. Plague bacteria spreads pretty poorly otherwise, which is why the main vector for bubonic plague is flea bites.

If it's the pneumonia style (i.e. the infection is in the lungs, not the lymph nodes) you have to start antibiotics very quickly or it's basically 100% fatal. So it's treatable, but only to a point. The good news is basic masks and quarantine are extremely effective, so the risk of outright spread beyond the initial patients and very early health care workers is very small.

Yes, the fact that is the plague is less worrying than it is plague from a bio research lab that escaped. The only unfounded, non verified news i have read is that it can from collecting of samples, not post experimenting. But your guess is as good as mine at this point

And there might be a teapot on the other side of the sun.

It’s bacteria, antibiotics work more generally than vaccines for viruses do.

There are of course, antibiotic resistant bacteria but we still have some exotic antibiotics in our arsenal.

If anything for a widespread bacterial plague I’d be more concerned about our ability to produce enough antibiotics rather than _if_ we could develop a cure

Bubonic is different than pneumonic.

They also destroy farmland and dig holes that cause hoofed animals to break their legs. The population got way out of control when their predators were mostly driven off by humans. And again, they spread bubonic plague. They are about as ecologically important as mosquitos. I understand the Venn diagram of HN users and people who grew up rural is infinitesimally small, but they are well known nuisance animals.

Come on, coyotes are classified as a least endangered animal and for good reason; they breed like crazy and eat almost anything. They are also a massive nuisance to livestock, a minor danger to people and they'll eat your cat or dog given half a chance. Culling prairie dogs would just mean their population would be slightly less booming.