Killer Contagion
Lately, there's been a lot of movie-fueled worry surrounding the possibility of a devastating global pandemic. Currently science is contributing to these fears in the form of a highly contagious lab-made variant of the H5N1 virus.
In case you missed it, American and Dutch scientists studying the virus in ferrets made the already deadly virus that much more dangerous by mutating some of its genes. Before the genetic changes were made, the virus could only spread through touch, but the mutations let it survive in the air, allowing it to pass between ferrets without the need for contact. The results sparked panic that the pathogen could leak out of the lab and trigger a pandemic.
But could a virus bring about the end of days?
Probably not, said Peter Katona, whose research at UCLA focuses on biological terrorism preparedness, though it would "wreak havoc."
A single virus is unlikely to wipe out all humans or animals on Earth because there's enough diversity that at least some would be resistant, agreed Caltech virologist Alice Huang.
Even the new lab strain of H5N1 virus, which only has five mutations, is similar enough to other versions of the flu virus that people would have some protection against it and it wouldn't wipe out all life, Huang said.
"For a virus to kill all humans on Earth, it would have to kill rapidly, like a week or less," Huang said. If it took any longer, the immune system would have time to attack it.
And the virus would have to infect most of the world's population simultaneously.
Picture thousands of drones disseminating a killer virus with aerosols "to every nook and cranny" of the planet at once, she said.
Or "you would have to imagine some new (highly virulent) pathogen that lived and reproduced in some unlikely pace, like under ice caps or in deep sea water near hydrothermal vents," she said. Then, the tiny predators would have to be spread far and wide, say by some huge natural disaster.
Because this is highly unlikely, Huang added, even science fiction usually imports apocalyptic pathogens from outer space.
Image courtesy of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
