[Godzilla]

I just posted a link that is to an Australian paper and says that it fears the bird flu will be used as a bio weapon. My thought is that the President knows more than we and thinks we are going to get hit with the flu as a weapon.

Bioweapons are very fickle things that can as easily turn upon the creators as much as the targets, especially such things as flu varients. To weaponize a flu that still hasn't reached the human-human mutation and only barely animal-human is likely beyond most technologies.

[nw_arizona_granny]

To weaponize a flu that still hasn't reached the human-human
mutation and only barely animal-human is likely beyond most
technologies.<<<<<

I am very willing for you to be correct on this one.

[Domestic Church]

"To weaponize a flu that still hasn't reached the human-human mutation and only barely animal-human is likely beyond most technologies."


There are ways of pushing a virus in either direction through generations, to less dangerous or more dangerous forms. Obviously much work is underfoot to push it to a more harmless form as well as develope vaccines quickly.

This H5N1 has a very high mortality in birds and mammals and has a track record of jumping species. It unfortunately isn't beyond the technology of many nefarious governments (such as Cuba*) to push it into a bioweapon and bioengineering is very hot in the universities (and too often they have shown in admission or hiring of potential terrorists a glaring lack of scruples ) but any avian flu that has jumped species is a threat without such tampering as precedence to mutate into a human to human variant shows.

We are in a race against time but we can't assume the seconds on the clock will be of the regular interval (with a regular herald wave that will allow for more vaccine production) or whether they will be sped up by either global travel or man made tampering.

*Cuban Docs are the backbone in the medical communities of many third world countries.