Would it be feasible to use Ebola as a terrorist biological weapon? Is there any way to collect it in a form where it could be redistributed to infect large numbers of people? I am not looking for a terrorist how-to guide here, but I am wondering if the nature of the virus would allow mass communication like that.
It needs to be either waterborne or airborne and have a specific latency period. Too soon, and the bulk of the population will simply miss being infected. Too late, and you run the risk of some organization like Fort Detrick pulling their own stuff out, and providing inocculations.
I do believe that while bio weapons look good on paper, getting a straight answer about mutations, probably has stopped any serious attempt to actually pull a bio strike off, have been still born. As well, they are a poor mans weapon. A country like US or Russia has other normal options, any form of bio warfare, would be a form of area denial, rather than a terror weapon.
Declan
Well, the Soviets were working on weaponizing the Marburg virus, a hemorrhagic fever Filoviridae related to Ebola.
It’s really a fascinating subject, when you start studying it. Quite a few of the agents weaponized in the US bioweapons program, for example, actually had relatively low mortality rates—a disease that is horribly incapacitating can be as good or better than a lethal one, as it might force an enemy to withdraw and sink resources to treating stricken people, rather than just burying them.
Considering the hue and cry on Fox these days, I’d say the 100% natural spread of Ebola is terrorizing a sizeable fraction of their fan base. Does that count?
Tom Clancy’s book “executive orders” dealt with precisely this scenario some 20 years ago. Spookily it also considers the danger from a “United Islamic Republic”.
The Ebola in Executive Orders was a fictional substrain that was transmitted via aerosol.
Indeed, It is worth pointing that ebola is horrendous but as yet only infectious through direct contact.
As I recall in the book it ended up not being as effective as anticipated because it rendered people so ill so quickly that they weren’t mobile enough to spread the virus further.
Someone can correct me if I am mistaken, but some years ago I read Ken Alibek’s book (Biohazard?) and towards the end IIRC he alleged that the Soviets were working on crossing Ebola with Smallpox to get something that spread like smallpox and had the effects of Ebola. He was the former director of Biopreparat, the (illegal) Soviet bioweapons program.
I feel pretty confident in saying it’s possible. Back to the binary string analogy : ebola’s a string N bits long. Sections of that string code for proteins that do specific functions. These proteins are optimized for specific tasks, and any adjustment to the code for the protein will cause it to be less efficient at a task. This means the virus is more or less trapped on top of a fitness peak.
However, human genetic engineers can find the code for other proteins from other viruses that are more resilient and better at surviving and transmitting themselves in the outside world. They can even paste in genes for things like botulism toxin to make a weapon that would be almost immediately lethal. They can even dig up the code for proteins that add error correction so the virus is slower to mutate.
It’s possible for random mutations to make these kind of wide spread redesign level changes, but it’s enormously unlikely. It took millions of years to reach this point.
Even more insidious would be to make a variant of a common, harmless virus such as the rhinovirus that causes colds and add in genes to cause something like mad cow disease. This might be tough, given you’re attempting to insert a gene for a protein that when normally folded (which the host cell should do correctly) is harmless. You’d want to insert a version of the gene that always causes the malformed version of the protein.
Then you’d have the kind of world ending bioweapon sci-fi authors dream of. It would spread like wildfire and infect most of the planet, but cause no immediate symptoms, just a slow death from mad cow disease 10 years later.
If I recall the book, the terrorists underestimated the lethality because when “testing” they didn’t use antibiotics or, indeed, any real medicine besides bed rest…
I am pretty sure that a body catapult, or turning a dead body into liquid wth a huge blender and spreading it over a crowd WOULD cause some mayhem.
Is an infected terrorist jumping off a tall building with a grenade or other bomb weaponized?
Halfway down the bomb goes off and aerosolized ebola blood spreads downwind.
Don’t forget the liberal pinko commie enviro-villains of the next novel, Rainbow Six. In their quest to restore Gaia to her glory, they weaponize ebola by fortifying it with something else, cancer genes IIRC. The virus was supposed to be spread via a water-fogging system used for cooling people off at the Summer Olympics. Tom Clancy must have thought this would be particularly deadly because the bad guys don’t actually get to do it (unlike the kamikaze attack on the Capitol in Debt of Honor or the nuke (!!) going off at the Superbowl in Sum of All Fears) before the good guys catch up to them.