Two questions on preservation and distribution:
If a bad guy had a vial of some bad stuff 10 years ago, what would it take to preserve it all this time? I’m sure it varies depending on what it is, but could anything really bad be kept for 10 years with minimal effort ?
Let’s say you had some people with the same mindset as suicide bombers. Could they effectively contaminate themselves with a biological agent and go forth to multiply?
Yes to both.
Why do you want this info?
To be better informed when engaging in Great Debates with other Great Debaters.
No. Most BW agents have a shelf-life measured in weeks to months. The exception would be B. anthracis spores, which have remained viable once weaponized for up to 2 years.
Not as easy as it seems. Transmission is partially based on the method by which the individual contracted the disease. For example, if you have a BW agent that is capable of airborne transmission, a suicide “bomber” who was injected with the agent would not spread the agent via aerosol as easily as an infected person who caught the disease via an airborne route.
-CynicalGabe
Master’s Candidate, Nonproliferation Studies.
As an amendment to answer 1: If the agent was properly frozen for the entire time, it is possible that they could keep it for many years.
Of course there are any number of viruses that remain perfectly functional for decades if properly dried. They don’t even require referigeration. IIRC smallpox is routinely strored at room temp. in crystalline form.
I’d like to see some evidence for this claim. There are some odd diseases like bubonic plague that take a slightly different form depending on whether infection is oral, pulmonary or cross-dermal. However the vast majority of diseases are not like that. A person injected with influenza or polio will have exactly the the same ability to disperse it via coughing as a person who contracted it in that manner. Basically diseases that have evolved to be disseminated through aerosols will attack or irritate the lung tissues to achieve that end. they don’t care how they enter the bloodstream, they still end up affecting the lungs.
I disagree, if only because my professor, who is a microbiologist, said so. I will find a cite a share with all of you.
It depends on your definition of “minimal effort”, If your guy just sticks a slant of plane of gram negative bacteria into a fridge and leaves it there, he may have some viables, but probably not. If you dry them properly (I have no idea how this is done, but ATCC sends desiccated bacteria to me all the time) you can have them stored for a very long time. Anything that sporulates, will have a pretty good shot of being viable. However, it is super simple to move your cultures monthly to new slants and keep them indefinitely. The problem with this, is that after ten years you have no idea what you have. You may have very well lost (or gained) some of your virulence through mutation of 120 (ten years x 12 transfers) generations.
There is no reason that the method of transmission changes the manifestation of disease. Once a disease becomes systemic, it is the same whether you inhaled it, absorbed it, or injected it. It’s the strain which effects the disease. Of course your guy could die before he became an effective vector. In addition, a single guy is probably not going to infect very many people. if your guy gets on a plane, and infects a couple of people, and then he dies, the CDC would immediately contact the other passengers, and the kibosh would be on. It’s actually not very easy to spread an acute disease. If it were, we’d be sick all the time.
You should get new generation every day at least, even under refrigeration. 10 years will be a lot more than 120 generations.
Nope. It doesn’t happen that way. Bacterial cultures have distinctive growth patterns: lag-log-stationary-death
This part is true, but I just trying to make a point. If you want further information bacterial growth here you go:
I’ll use E.coli as an example: In log phase they divide every 20 minutes. That means that standard 48 hour incubation would give you 960 generations. Multiply that by 120 and you get 115200 generations. After approximately 48 hours your culture will start to enter a stationary phase at which the bacteria will reach static growth (death = growth). Refrigeration will extend the stationary phase, and delay the death phase, by slowing the rate of nutrient usage.
Bacteria will not divide indefinitely, or remain in log phase unless they are in a constantly renewed media, called a chemostat. This is usually done with flowing media in, while removing the media. It’s usually used in protein purification bioreactors which generally use rE.coli. It’s pretty expensive, and I don’t think the equipment for high volume is readily available. But the worst part of chemostat is that eventually your culture is eventually going to be contaminated due to the constant introduction of media.
Update: My prof is in Croatia right now, on some damn fool idealistic crusade, so it will be a few days before I have a source to back up my assertion regarding transmission.
The mistake you are making is confusing doubling time with generation. Bacteria in stationary and death phases have slow or even negative doubling times, but they are still dividing, and you will still be getting a new generation every day at least.
As you point out, in the stationary phase death = growth. That is not at all the same as your belief that the generation time has become infinite. In fact the generation time in the stationary phases can be shorter then in the exponential phase, but with fewer individual cells surviving.
To help understand, try to think of it like Europeans in the middle ages compared to the 1950s. The human population in the middle ages was in a stationary phase: the population was stable because of high pre-reproduction mortality. But the average age of first child was around 17 so the generation span was a mere 34 years. In contrast in the 1940s human popualtion is in a log phase and the population of Europe is booming. But the avereage child isn’t born until something like 25 years of age, making the generation time 50 years.
The practical upshot of all this is that with or without a chemsotat your bacteria will be producing new generations at least once a day even under refrigeration. And they will be doing that no matter what growth phase they are in.
It’s very easy in ecology to confuse generation time with doubling time, but they are in no way the same thing. Generation times tend to remain within fairly tight bounds for most species regardless of conditions (0 - 24 hours for most bacteria, 0-40 years for large mammals). Doubling time varies wildly for all species and can be anything from 0- infinite years for any species.
I am not confusing anything. Here’s a resource for you: http://www.mansfield.ohio-state.edu/~sabedon/black06.htm If you see, the definition of generation as: “Generation time it takes a bacterial population to double in size (number) during log-phase growth” if you’d like more on this please see here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=+Generation+time+bacteria
I have no idea what this sentence means. Infinite? Generation time can not be faster that that of log phase.
I’m gonna ask for a cite on this.
I can see it’s easily confused, as you clearly are.
Blake I just re-read that last post of mine, and I didn’t mean it to be that harsh. I’m sorry.
I said I would return.
I’m sorry I cannot share the full article as some of our research materials are restricted. This is what I meant by saying that a “biological suicide bomber” would be difficult to create in practice.