Comments on: BioShield: Bad News

By: Karen

Karen — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 20:24:13 +0000

One year later....are you worried now Brian....you should be!!!!!!! I have direct knowledge of a potential cure for TB that has not been able to get funding because of all this NONSENSE! And we have our first XDRTB in a "regular" US citizen...and we all freaked out. AGAIN I have direct knowledge that a person in Nepal with XDRTB was supposedly going to get on plane and come to the US, "because there might be something that could be done in a US hospital that isn't available in Nepal." SO there's one no one knows about...on a plane, with I'm sure a more active case than Speaks had...I was cut off from anymore communication when I strongly objected to the travel and sent a copy of the WHO air travel guidelines before I could ID the person and I was skeptical at the time anyone would believe me if I tried to tell someone. And I'm just "joe citizen"...who do I think I am accusing someone of something when I couldn't even ID them! WHEN are we going to wake up!!!!!! It's not the terrorists that are going to kill us with this stuff...it's normal everyday people, ignorant people...but "normal" non-the-less.

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 15:59:58 +0000

Well, I understand that, but so what? It’s not like the push to develop treatments for diseases likely to be used in terror attacks is going to cause other research to grind to a halt.
We make decisions every day on how we spend our research dollars. TB may become a super-killer in the future, or it may not. There’s no way to tell.

By: Haninah

Haninah — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 15:30:11 +0000

I think you completely missed the point of the post, Brian. The question is not whether TB can be weaponized. It’s a major threat to humans both inside and outside the US without being weaponized.
Yes, the vast majority of the millions of people who die of it every year are dying in countries we don’t seem to care about (not that there aren’t deaths in the US, and lots of them in countries like Russia that we do care about). But when drug-resistant strains emerge (that’s not a future tense, it’s a present tense, as you’d know if you were reading the news last week, for example), they spread. Unlike, say, anthrax, TB is a highly contagious disease.
How bad is TB? “Between 1600 and 1900, TB caused 20% of all deaths in Europe.” (http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/dn10013-cystic-fibrosis-gene-protects-against-tuberculosis.html). That means that one in five of your ancestors (I’m assuming) probably died not from old age, and not from cancer, and not from a sharp pointy object, but from TB.
I’m not saying you should lose sleep and sell your stocks because of the coming TB plague. I’m just saying, don’t be so quick to dismiss something as a threat to national security, and to your security, just because it doesn’t come in a package postmarked “Tora Bora.”

By: Brian

Brian — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 13:53:02 +0000

Yeah. “On the cusp of real progress”. Right. So a researcher’s pet project, one that by his own admission, has had very little success, gets its funding cut.
I’m sure TB kills a lot of people. But it’s gonna be insanely hard to weaponize. So I’m not worried.