GoGaslightYerself t1_je9fsq5 wrote
Reply to comment by 8i66ie5ma115 in TIL that tularemia is an infectious disease that can be contracted by “inhaling particles from an infected rabbit ground up [by] a lawnmower”. by krisalyssa
> There’s a book called Biohazard by Ken Alibek
I read about him in a New Yorker article by Richard Preston entitled "The Bioweaponeers" where Alibek described leading the Russian germ-warfare lab Biopreparat (with 32,000 scientists and staff), trying to create "chimera" viruses combining the traits of anthrax, smallpox, ebola, etc. "Ebolapox" (one of the viruses Alibek believed they were working on) sounds devastating. Pretty chilling stuff and worthwhile reading.
Excerpt from that (1998) article:
> More recently, Alibek claims, the Vector researchers may have created a recombinant Ebola-smallpox chimera. One could call it Ebolapox. Ebola virus uses the molecule RNA for its genetic code, whereas smallpox uses DNA. Alibek believes that the Russian researchers made a DNA copy of the disease-causing parts of Ebola, then grafted them into smallpox. Alibek said he thinks that the Ebolapox virus is stable -- that is, that it will replicate successfully in a test tube or in animals -- which means that, once created, Ebolapox will live forever in a laboratory, and will not uncreate itself. Thus a new form of life may have been brought into the world.
> "The Ebolapox could produce the form of smallpox called blackpox," Alibek says. Blackpox, sometimes known as hemorrhagic smallpox, is the most severe type of smallpox disease. In a blackpox infection, the skin does not develop blisters. Instead, the skin becomes dark all over. Blood vessels leak, resulting in severe internal hemorrhaging. Blackpox is invariably fatal. "As a weapon, the Ebolapox would give the hemorrhages and high mortality rate of Ebola virus, which would give you a blackpox, plus the very high contagiousness of smallpox," Alibek said.
crispy_attic t1_jea526a wrote
>Blackpox, sometimes known as hemorrhagic smallpox, is the most severe type of smallpox disease. In a blackpox infection, the skin does not develop blisters. Instead, the skin becomes dark all over.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of racists suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
welltimedappearance t1_jea4m2h wrote
ya know, I didn’t want to sleep tonight anyways
ebolashuffle t1_jea92mo wrote
The Hot Zone and The Demon in the Freezer by Preston are also great reads
GoGaslightYerself t1_jeacw16 wrote
Yep, Preston also wrote another riveting New Yorker article about what they thought was an outbreak of Ebola zaire at a research primate quarantine facility just outside Washington, D.C. in 1989.
US Army doctors had to sneak into the facility in spacesuits, under the cover of darkness (so as not to panic residents), to euthanize hundreds of Ebola-infected monkeys (without panicking the monkeys and without getting bitten), bag up their corpses in biocontainment Level 4 bags, and then hermetically seal and slag the entire building with formaldehyde gas. After it was all over, it turned out that >!the macaques had a type of Ebola that didn't harm humans...the virus was eventually named Ebola reston after the town by the same name in Virginia...but talk about major pucker factor while it was all underway...!<
Preston was often an incredibly lyrical writer IMHO. At the end of the article about the Reston events, he recounts visiting the Primate Quarantine Unit some years after the crisis was over. Here he is:
>I walked along the back wall of the former monkey house until I came to a window. Inside the building, climbing vines had rioted, and had pressed themselves against the inside of the glass. The vine was Tartarian honeysuckle, a weed that grows in waste places and abandoned ground. I couldn’t see through the leaves into the former hot zone. I walked around to the side of the building, and found another glass door, beribboned with tape. I pressed my nose against the glass and cupped my hands around my eyes, and saw a bucket smeared with a dry brown crust. It looked like monkey excrement. I guessed that it had been stirred with Clorox. A spider had strung a web between a wall and the bucket of shit, and had dropped husks of flies and yellow jackets on the floor. Ebola had risen in these rooms, flashed its colors, replicated, and subsided into the forest.
ebolashuffle t1_jeafm7a wrote
The Hot Zone is about that outbreak. Not sure if the article is an excerpt or separate, sounds familiar to me.
workaccount77234 t1_jeaxpk6 wrote
Well, hopefully they learned from the covid experience that once a virus is out in the world it invariably spreads to every country. There is no way to keep it contained these days, so they would end up infecting themselves and their own country too, thus making it pointless as a weapon
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