DISASTER The Germ-Bio Warfare-Epidemics in History Thread

[Melodi]

OK, gang, I'm starting this here because it is just getting too distracting on the main Kung-Flu thread and honestly the arguments and/or information can go on forever on these topics.

It is up to the mods if they want to enforce putting this stuff on a separate thread or not, but I thought as a courtesy to people looking for breaking news, I'd start a new thread (and I'm one of the folks who has posted on these other and somewhat distracting topics).

Topics that have come up on the main thread are:

1. Can diseases be targeted for certain racial/ethnic groups?

2. How did smallpox and other near slate-wiper diseases get to the Americas from Europe?

3. What are some of the comparable contagion rates between historical epidemics like The Black Death or Measles and Kung-Flu?

4. What are the markers and/or probabilities that this is a genetically engineered virus?

I'm sure we can think of lots more questions and I look forward to reading ideas and responses.

 

[night driver]

Germs Guns Steel.

Took me a few weeks to be able to walk past that one comfortably. I don't usually react that way.

 

[Pinecone]

I just posted this on the coronavirus thread. If diseases can be skewed towards certain ethnic groups in nature, then I don't see why they can't be skewed towards certain ethnic groups through bio-engineering. Is there going to be bleed over because most of us are a Heinz-57 mix? Sure, but one can still make some evil inroads on a certain populations that one might want to eliminate.

Sickle cell disease is more common in certain ethnic groups, including: People of African descent, including African-Americans (among whom 1 in 12 carries a sickle cell gene) Hispanic-Americans from Central and South America. People of Middle Eastern, Asian, Indian, and Mediterranean descent.
Treatments: Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation
Symptoms: Pain; Infection
Sickle Cell Disease - American Society of Hematology

https://www.hematology.org › Patients › Anemia › Sickle-Cell

 

[Melodi]

Yes, they can be "skewed" to people with certain genetic markers, the problem is that there are no actual "race-specific" markers that are exclusive enough to be of any practical use.

On the genetic level, people are cheetas, we have very-very similar (but not identical DNA) the greatest genetic diversity found on Earth is believe it or not in Subsaharan Africa.

Those people may "look" alike to many of us European background types but actually they tend to be a lot more genetically diverse than anywhere else.

Once you get out of Africa, people get less and less diverse so as I mentioned before, a disease that is aimed at "Jews" is very likely to also take out Arabs and anyone with some Semitic DNA.

Anything designed to take out "Asians" could end up taking out a huge portion of Russians and Americans as well as the Chinese and Southeast Asians.

It isn't that such research doesn't exist or that it never happens in a test tube, it is just that so far, at least officially, the results have been too erratic and impractical to use without being a danger to the host country that tries to use it on their enemies.

We, humans, are just both too much genetically alike and too genetically mixed up for this to work almost anywhere unless, as Nightwolf suggested, your goal is to knock out some isolated tribe in the Amazon or something. Even there, there are hints of very ancient Australian DNA as well as some European that tend to get in there over 500 years.

 

[TheSearcher]

Disclaimer: I am not married to the idea that CoronaChan has a taste for Asians, but I am interested in it as a possibility.

The idea that humans are a "race" seems totally correct to me. Generally speaking, the mean intelligence, strength, etc. don't vary all that much along the mean. The exceptions to the mean are usually special cases where either a convergence of best traits and environmental factors result in optimal outcomes for a specific person, or the opposite is true and the worst case results from the worst of all combinations.

However, it's undeniable that there are genetic differences that cluster together to produce sharp differences in ethnicity, mostly in appearance, but also in things less-readily seen. As someone recently posted on the live thread, sickle-cell anemia is one example of a distinct issue with a small set of ethnicities. Also consider something like the Inuit, living off of animal blubber quite well that would not be sufficient nutrition for most people. There are differences in the landscape of the human genome that really exist.

I'm of the opinion that a virus could be engineered to target a genetic trait tied to a specific ethnicity. Could that trait be spread amongst the general human population to some degree? Absolutely. But some are clustered in certain ethnicity. As such, that provides a target. For the outliers that have that trait outside the obvious ethnic population, they would likewise be at risk of affliction. Those are the people I would term "collateral damage".

There is also a collateral approach to such a targeting scheme. A virus could be targeted at a group that is known not to typically have an effective immune response. You wouldn't have to even perform any genetic engineering to attack a certain ethnic group, you just perform a survey of possible contagion and pick one against which your target population has no defense.

I think this line of inquiry is important, because China is an authoritarian state with growing resource issues. They have a significantly difficult balance of food, supplies, and logistics against a massive, and expanding, population. With little means to improve the level of food, supplies, and logistics on one side of the scale, what would an authoritarian regime choose to restore balance? Reduce the population. If anyone reading this thinks that's too "woo" for you, consider the draconian measures taken in birth limits, etc. and it's apparent that the Chinese government is not squeamish about striving to fix their problem.

Added to that was a story from a couple of days ago about some coronavirus researchers being expelled back to China, and that they may have stolen samples of what may be the virus in discussion. Also interesting is the Chinese saying that maybe we attacked them...

So you have a China drowning in people, a horrible economy, and American sanctions driving them to their knees. Consider that they might find it palatable to cull their population, then blame the West for it, and "retaliates" in some fashion that they can sell to their people and the rest of the world as justified.

 

[Melodi]

Oh, I don't put it past them, and I'm sure nations (including the US, Russia, Isreal, and China) are still trying to make something to target certain genetic markers.

But even Sickle Cell also appears sometimes in Greece (or a form of it does) with historically high rates of Malaria - so again it isn't impossible, but so far it looks like a rather difficult thing to pull off.

Now if a nation-state or other player (especially say Jihadi type terrorists) just wanted to kill millions of people, well I've said for over 20 years - just find a disease that looks like a cold or flu, takes at least a week to ten days to show symptoms, is symptomatic as early as possible and release it in working-class communities (in the US) where many people have jobs working with the public and most people can't afford to go to the doctor or be in the hospital.

By the time the disease is identified (and our suicide patient zeros are long dead) thousand or millions will have been exposed from bus drivers, nurses, auto repair shops, Take Out businesses, fast-food counter workers, baristas, etc.

Or as Nightwolf says "It is almost impossible to stop an enemy who is willing to die to kill you."

 

[MinnesotaSmith]

Germs Guns Steel.

Took me a few weeks to be able to walk past that one comfortably. I don't usually react that way.

Fair book. Skip the rest of the author's books, though; he used up all his brains on that one book.

 

[Melodi]

Fair book. Skip the rest of the author's books, though; he used up all his brains on that one book.

Collapse is also pretty good, though already somewhat dated, especially on the Greenland stuff.

Though I did take one thing away from that book that historically seems to be true more often than not, that was the basic idea than in a total collapse situation (especially of actual resources) being wealthy and/or powerful simply buys you a ticket to be either the last to starve and/or to be swung from a tree (or lampost) when those beneath you have had enough.

Again that isn't always true, and sometimes you can do what is now suspected the Greenlanders mostly did - which was sail away over a few decades as people got tired of living in poverty in the back of the then-known universe (in terms of Europeans).

But I think his best thought out book is Germs, Guns and Steel

 

[naturallysweet]

another idea that pops into my mind is to develop two diseases that are closely related. Think cow pox and smallpox. Drop the cow pox version on the population you want to protect. Let a large quantity get infected. Then drop the second version aka smallpox on the world population.

Sure, there will be collateral damage. But the psychopath leaders don't care.