How is it that we haven’t seen more disasters caused by missing suitcase nukes or smallpox? My guess is the security services are better at keeping things stable than we think but it also probably means you’re under perpetual surveillance.

It was pretty well documented that Russian stockpiles of their India strain went missing by the metric ton, post-USSR.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;SB1039129770495563833" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;SB1039129770495563833</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1999&#x2F;06&#x2F;13&#x2F;world&#x2F;government-report-says-3-nations-hide-stocks-of-smallpox.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1999&#x2F;06&#x2F;13&#x2F;world&#x2F;government-report-s...</a>

And supposedly the virus can survive for an extremely long time in a dormant state. Could someone do a little bit of homework who died from smallpox, dig up their corpses, and find live samples that way?

Winston Churchill held out against using Anthrax against the Nazi’s. I think it’s very surprising actually what countries won’t do in an all-out war.After all, the goal is usually to get the enemy to surrender &#x2F; capture available resources &#x2F; not turn the rest of the world against you. Millions can certainly die, but it could be very possible say for a World War III between US and China where no one winds up using nuclear weapons.

In an all out war those nations holding it tight, might release it. Samson option or just a madman dictator (his military might go ahead with the order too.) So, USA spends next to nothing and has insurance against this unlikely but catastrophic scenario. Makes perfect sense.Others in comments also made a good point...what if the virus survives decades in cemeteries and is released when they dig or move the cemetery. Within a week hours it would probably be spread all over the world, given globalization.

The article makes it sound like the only remaining samples are tightly controlled. Remember just a few years back the NIH found some samples lying around in a closet: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;11&#x2F;health&#x2F;smallpox-found-nih-alive&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;11&#x2F;health&#x2F;smallpox-found-nih-ali...</a>I doubt that it was the only sample in the world to escape eradication.

Don&#x27;t mean to brag, but making this edit to Wikipedia felt damn good:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;w&#x2F;index.php?title=Rinderpest&amp;type=revision&amp;diff=431414310&amp;oldid=430846052" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;w&#x2F;index.php?title=Rinderpest&amp;type=r...</a>

There&#x27;s a whole &quot;Is vs Was&quot; discussion on the Talk page, for anyone tempted to re-litigate the matter. I&#x27;ll just point out that other extinct items are often worded like &quot;The dodo is an extinct bird...&quot;[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Talk:Smallpox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Talk:Smallpox</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dodo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dodo</a>

I still get a good feeling going to the Wikipedia page for smallpox and seeing the first two words of the entry:&quot;Smallpox was&quot;

Rinderpest was an infectious disease of cattle, which was eradicated slightly more recently. A cattle disease might seem like a weird priority, but for marginal cattle farmers in poor nations your cows dying basically means very likely you&#x27;ll starve. So in effect we wiped out one cause of poor people starving to death.

We&#x27;re getting damned close with guinea worms -- down from 3.5 million cases in 1986 to 22 in 2015.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eradication_of_dracunculiasis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eradication_of_dracunculiasis</a>May the day when it drops to zero come soon.

From what I can tell, wild Polio cases have been in the low double digits the past couple years. Hopefully it will be gone by the end of next decade.

It&#x27;s still the only one we&#x27;ve eradicated insofar as I can recollect... (Polio will, hopefully, follow in the coming decades.)Aside - Good video series by Yale for anyone interested in the history of diseases in western society:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=UoWxdlGBVTI&amp;list=PL7C32775F0529BFEF" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=UoWxdlGBVTI&amp;list=PL7C32775F0...</a>

Being cynical, you could say this was before the internet - if we tried something similar today, no doubt the few people in the world with conspiracy theories about the small pox vaccine would find each other on some shadowy crackpot forum, start a facebook group, make a professional looking pseudoscientific website, find an ageing B celebrity to endorse them, make an extreme video that starts appearing in algorithmic feeds, launch a facebook ad campaign targeting both the anti-establishment left and conspiracy laden alt-right, get endorsed on twitter by Trump and other populists, crowdfund some junk science research that gets published in a predatory journal (hopefully not the Lancet again) and sooner or later the chance to eradicate small pox is lost.We may have hit peak future, and are now heading down the other side...

I&#x27;ve just learned that vaccinating people suffering from AIDS makes any sense at all (that their immune system benefits from it); thanks. Do you have any pointers to a more extensive treatment of that topic (it&#x27;s hard to search for due to popularity of articles about research into vaccinating against HIV)?

We were really lucky to get that done before AIDS. The classic smallpox vaccine is a live-virus vaccine and dangerous to people with compromised immune systems. There&#x27;s a newer non-replicating vaccine, but that didn&#x27;t come out until 2014.[1][1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bavarian-nordic.com&#x2F;pipeline&#x2F;imvamune.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bavarian-nordic.com&#x2F;pipeline&#x2F;imvamune.aspx</a>

When I was a boy, I had something-or-other that made me at very high risk for complications if I took the Smallpox vaccine. When we traveled to Africa in the 1960s, my mother had to take special documentation proving that I culd not take the vaccine, and that I had been tested for Smallpox.My understanding is that it was regulations prohibiting travel between countries by unvaccinated persons that helped eradicate Smallpox, and my paperwork is now a quaint story about a bygone era.Or it would be, if I didn’t remember the whole thing afresh every time anti-vaxxers demand the “right” to send their unvaccinated children into public schools.

We haven&#x27;t eradicated it though. I guess it&#x27;s a bit dated now, but you might enjoy &quot;The Demon in the Freezer,&quot; written by the same fellow who wrote &quot;The Hot Zone&quot; (a pop history of Ebola Reston).

Me too. Then I am awed once again when I remember the if the current anti-vaccination trend continues, we might never do it again.
As I read in another HN comment yesterday: &quot;we, humans, can do great things, but we are also great at getting in our own way&quot;.

No, you are thinking of Polio. Live smallpox only exists in two research centers, one in the US and one in Russia.

I thought some tiny pockets of smallpox came back recently..

We will hopefully eradicate polio soon.

We&#x27;ve eradicated many species.Some of them were a damn good thing to get rid of!

Yep. That was the bit when aliens should have landed and made their selves known saying &quot;alright guys, you&#x27;ve passed.&quot; as they then go on to share the wisdom of the rest of the universe. Was disappointed they didn&#x27;t. I guess we have to show them a few more tricks.

Retrorockets and landing backwards have been around (e.g. the Apollo lunar module). The rockets landing backwards thing is hard for a different reason among many other things, namely the inverted pendulum problem.

Rockets landing themselves all backwards is pretty amazing no matter how often I see it.Rockets don&#x27;t do that.....

I am awed every time I think that we have eradicated a disease.It’s just such a “the future is now” thing. I mean, it was 1980, but still.

Are the in vivo animal tests considered significantly more convincing than in vitro tests on human cell cultures?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;29972742" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;29972742</a>They received special dispensation to declare it effective if it treated monkeypox in monkeys and rabbitpox in rabbits.

How do they know that the treatment is effective? I would assume it has been tested only in vitro, unless they infected and cured volunteers.

well... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.independent.co.uk&#x2F;environment&#x2F;farmers-chickens-antibiotic-boost-weight-colistin-farm-animals-infections-a8191521.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.independent.co.uk&#x2F;environment&#x2F;farmers-chickens-a...</a>

They exist: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Drug_of_last_resort" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Drug_of_last_resort</a>

If you’re a company that can develop a new, effective antibiotic, you’d sell it to everybody and make out like a bandit.

Smallpox is a virus so you&#x27;d need a virophage or vaccines.

There&#x27;s also phage therapy:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Phage_therapy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Phage_therapy</a>Which is using viruses to kill bacteria.Also I imagine that gene editing might also become a tool in combating infections in the near future.

Few people die just due to antibiotic resistant bacteria. Generally someone’s immune system is compromised from something like cancer before they are at risk of death. And at that point it’t a race to find what’s going to finish the job.

At the cost of killing those infected by antibiotic resistant strains now.

Can we fund development and stockpile reserves of new, effective antibiotic, all while not selling it to anyone else? As an insurance against bioterrorism, if nothing else.

There is morality in warfare, war slowly civilized in Europe during the Middle Ages and Christianity was a big reason for that. Tactics that would have been effective weren&#x27;t used simply because it became unconscionable.The Crusades, and then the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, were both notable departures, and both saw militaries surprised when their adversaries used tactics that had long been banned in Europe. The French were not expecting the Russians to put the torch to their own lands so as to deny the French forage. It made the difference that led to the famous infographic.It&#x27;s not unreasonable to think that nation-states refrain from biological warfare for moral reasons. As effective as they might be, the government using them wouldn&#x27;t survive either due to politics or the hammer of the world coming down on them.

Give it another 25 years; I&#x27;m sure we&#x27;ll see genetically engineered plagues used by ethnostates (find some mutation that a large portion of your population has that your opponents do not &amp; make that confer resistance) or as an instrument of genocide (the same thing but in reverse) by then.Or if you&#x27;re willing to plan ahead a little more... Develop the plague and the vaccine a decade or more before use, and spend the intervening decade adding it to childhood vaccines and seasonal flu shots. When it comes time for use, have the remainder of your population vaccinated.I may be a pessimist, but I&#x27;d guess that &quot;biological warfare is ineffective in achieving the aims of nation-states&quot; won&#x27;t be a thing forever.

Why aren’t biological weapons effective? I mean if US wanted to wipe out Its enemies or vice versa, if someone really hated the US army, biological bomb that would go off after a large part of army is already infected would be the most deadliest right?

The main difference is that none of the ones you mentioned really spreads.bioweapons and computer viruses are made to spread in a viral way, without the explicit intervention of humans. So once it&#x27;s out there, it can&#x27;t be stopped. In the future, nanobots could potentially be a third one too.So yes, while biowarfare is banned, the consequences of doing it is far different.

Plenty of war practices are banned but still carried out. Torture of prisoners, chemical warfare, targeting civilians, killing enemies who have surrendered or who can&#x27;t fight back. All of these get committed by major modern states - most of them even by the US in the last ten years.Governments refrain from biological warfare because it&#x27;s not effective in achieving their aims, not because it&#x27;s banned.

Nation states usually act somewhat rationally because they want to continue their existence. What you have to worry about are the zealots who don’t care about dying as long as they can take their enemies out with them because they think they will have a better life on the other side.

It&#x27;s hard to imagine a nation choosing to release something like smallpox considering the risk of it coming back at you and infecting your own population is pretty high. It&#x27;s not like anyone has a fully resistant population where they could be sure it wouldn&#x27;t spread to their own nation, or allies or generally cause political &#x2F; military response by other nations.I mean if two nations were at war, my nation &#x2F; I didn&#x27;t care, but fucking small pox showed up spreading around I&#x27;d be all for some serious interventionist stuff.... I imagine most nations would be all for it.Granted, chemical warfare could still be a thing :(

I was a Nuke, Chem Bio Officer in the US Army in the early to mid 2000s.. Bio weapons are very much a threat. Just because we haven’t seen widespread use doesn’t mean they are a benign threat.Belligerent states don’t care about what is “banned.” Chemical weapons are also banned but there have been several public and not-so-public uses of those during the past 20 years.

Everything old becomes new again. It just changes appearance.Nukes, synthetic bio and chemical weapons are high-profile. If you acquire, produce or use them, you end up on the international radar. Everybody&#x27;s watching you.But coordinate some useful idiots into convincing enough of their own population that vaccines are bad for them, and you&#x27;ll pave the way for wiping them out by reintroducing the simple pathogens those vaccines protected against.The future of biological weapons will be organic, all-natural and non-attributable. We are setting ourselves up for something very bad.

That’s not really true though, and you don’t have to kill people to have an effective weapon. You could releas foot and mouth and devastate an economy or starve people. The truth is that biological weapons could be very effective, depending on your aims. You can attack people to weaken, but not slaughter a population, to pave the way for a conventional assault. You can attack livestock, crops, and yes, go for mass slaughter. Ebola is an extreme case, but many other organisms have a more agreeable profile. Anthrax can be used as an area denial weapon because of its persistent nature for example.You just have to utterly lack a conscience, and that’s an ingredient already present in many cases.

The good thing is that biological weapons kind of suck at being weapons at least. If they are too lethal while horrifying their spread is mercifully limited like ebola - if they are too weak they don&#x27;t wind up noticed. They stick around and either have no collateral discrimination or are already cured or vaccinated for your own people. Even the classic &#x27;throw plague corpses over the walls&#x27; has the twofold problem of having to expose yourself to your weapons to use them and the territory or loot to claim now being tainted.The end impact wouldn&#x27;t be good start with - less freedom of movement overall with increased tracking and quarantines, less global trade, more restrictions, and bodily autonomy would be a thing of the past as going untested at borders let alone unvaccinated would be an unacceptable threat. Your body &#x2F;is&#x2F; their business as anything related to the immune system becomes a matter of national security. Said heavyhandenss would breed its own backlash as well to perpetuate conflicts as conspiracies that they are making the disease would spread regardless of truth - which is a bit of a problem now even from the people who insist AIDS was a secret project or Ebola workers being attacked by people who don&#x27;t have causation and correlation straight. Think &#x27;fake news&#x27; is bad now along with fact-immune belief? Imagine how tempting censorship would be in the face of those destabilizers combined with the Streisand effect. Then there is without the sociopathic easy solution &#x27;shoot the sick just in case&#x27; which would certainly lead to more travesties.The ironic kicker is that this dystopian state would have some upsides in making it in even the most vile dictator&#x27;s interests to overfund public health and ensure adequate food supply as starving people have weakened immune systems and may catch something to spread around. World hunger may be ironically ended by selfishness. Instead of Military Industrial Complex the term may well be Medical-Military Industrial Complex with fringe benefits. Overall it would be horrifying and I personally consider the most horrifying part is that there would be some large actual benefits to that twisted status quo.

I shudder to think what modern warfare would be like without biological weapons being banned.

I love that the subtitle gives the answer.

&gt; Polio is closest with just a few remaining countries.Actually Guinea worm disease is closest to eradication: closer than polio. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eradication_of_dracunculiasis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eradication_of_dracunculiasis</a>

Let&#x27;s be clear here. There are TWO eradicated diseases. Smallpox and a cattle disease that doesn&#x27;t affect humans.Otherwise our track record isn&#x27;t stellar. The efforts with other diseases that could be eradicated have struggled. Polio is closest with just a few remaining countries. Future eradication attempts may be much harder due to the rise of anti-vaxxers.

All vaccines have side effects -- the side effects are quite rare but are sometimes severe. Several thousand people have life-threatening reactions to vaccination each year.The standard vaccination schedule is comprised of vaccinations with benefits which outweigh the medical risk and cost. If you travel to less developed areas you may receive a wider array of vaccinations.For an eradicated disease there is no benefit and therefore no reason to assume the risk, or cost.

&gt; Based on past experience, it is estimated that between 1 and 2 people out of every 1 million people vaccinated may die as a result of life-threatening reactions to the vaccine.-- <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.who.int&#x2F;vaccine_safety&#x2F;committee&#x2F;topics&#x2F;smallpox&#x2F;questions&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.who.int&#x2F;vaccine_safety&#x2F;committee&#x2F;topics&#x2F;smallpox&#x2F;...</a>

&gt;...Smallpox is uniquely deadly...The indigenous people were exposed to many diseases, not just smallpox:&gt;...Numerous diseases were brought to North America, including bubonic plague, chickenpox, cholera, the common cold, diphtheria, influenza, malaria, measles, scarlet fever, sexually transmitted diseases, typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis, and pertussis (whooping cough).[2][3][4] Each of these brought destruction through sweeping epidemics, involving disability, illness, and extensive deaths<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Native_American_disease_and_epidemics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Native_American_disease_and_ep...</a>&gt;...it wiped out something like 75% of the indigenous population of the americas.It&#x27;s hard to give a precise estimate of how many deaths occurred. Some say it was much higher than 75%. For example:&gt;...Between 1492 and 1650 the Native American population may have declined by as much as 90% as the result of virgin-soil epidemics (outbreaks among populations that have not previously encountered the disease), compound epidemics, crop failures and food shortages.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.encyclopedia.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps&#x2F;impact-european-diseases-native-americans" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.encyclopedia.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;encyclopedias-almanacs-...</a>

&gt; Weaponized smallpox almost certainly exists.Yep, when they shipped us off to the Middle East in &#x27;03 they gave us the smallpox vaccination even if you had it as a kid because, well, WMDs.Don&#x27;t think I had it as a kid since I was born in &#x27;71 and that&#x27;s around the time they were phasing it out -- or at least didn&#x27;t have the vaccination scar before &#x27;03.

Because they are not gone.Weaponized smallpox almost certainly exists. It escaped a Soviet lab in the 70s and other countries including the US worked on it.Smallpox is uniquely deadly... it wiped out something like 75% of the indigenous population of the americas.

The smallpox vaccine used at the time of eradication had two main issues:1) In some (fairly small) fraction of recipients it lead to severe side-effects, including death.2) It was a live-virus vaccine, which meant a vaccine recipient could actually infect those around them (with the vaccine, effectively). This was a serious problem if anyone near the recipient was immune-compromised; the risk of deleterious side-effects in immune-compromised individuals, who would not be vaccinated normally) was much higher.There is a modern (a few years old!) smallpox vaccine that is a dead-virus vaccine and would have a very different cost-benefit tradeoff in medical terms. I don&#x27;t know what the economic tradeoff looks like (i.e. how expensive it is).

According to Wikipedia, for smallpox the reason was:&gt; Based on past experience, it is estimated that 1 or 2 people in 1 million (0.000198 percent) who receive the vaccine may die as a result, most often the result of postvaccinial encephalitis or severe necrosis in the area of vaccination (called progressive vaccinia). Given these risks, as smallpox became effectively eradicated and the number of naturally occurring cases fell below the number of vaccine-induced illnesses and deaths, routine childhood vaccination was discontinued in the United States in 1972, and was abandoned in most European countries in the early 1970s.

1 billion isn’t even worthy of a line item in the defense budget. Stick it there as part of national security in the event of biological warfare. QED.

Let’s say it cost $5 per person to vaccinate against smallpox. That’s well over $1 billion to vaccinate all Americans against a disease that no longer exists. Surely we could do something more useful with that money. Maybe vaccinate against a disease people can still catch.

Why do we discontinue vaccines for &quot;eradicated&quot; diseases? Is it just to save money? Did the vaccine have side effects that stop being worth it? On the other hand, besides protection from bioterrorism, can a vaccine provide some benefit in protecting against related diseases?

Or climate change.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;as-earth-warms-the-diseases-that-may-lie-within-permafrost-become-a-bigger-worry&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;as-earth-warms-th...</a>

People aren&#x27;t generally vacinated against small pox becuase it has been eradicated. If it comes back, it&#x27;s because of biowarefare or research mistake.

It would be unfortunate if otherwise eradicated diseases make a reoccurrence because of the ill-informed anti-vaccination movement. I hope this drug and others never has to see use in the future.

We already had a vaccine, LYMErix.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lyme_disease#Vaccination" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lyme_disease#Vaccination</a>No military involvement necessary, only emotional restraint and emphasis on rationality.

Because in the current political climate you can only get money for something if it can be weaponized somehow.

Somebody needs to come up with a military application of Lyme disease so we can get a vaccine for it finally.

For profit!You know what&#x27;s better than selling an expansive drug for a deadly diseases?Selling an expansive drug for a deadly disease that no longer exists!This way, you get profits without the potential lawsuits from patients, of having to bother with stupid things like efficiency or unexpected side effects.Even better: your customer is the US government - the same customers that buy F-35 flying turkeys.I thought fearmongering during the various influenza fears until the governements stockpiled oseltamivir (tamiflu) was brilliant. But this is pure genius!!

I think some labs keep the same virus for ethical and unethical reasons.

Please don&#x27;t do this here.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

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A drug for smallpox has been approved, even though the disease no longer exists