NationStates Jolt Archive


Possible Bio-Terrorist Advances From Rodent Problem?

Archaic Slang Words
11-12-2003, 01:26
SOURCE: ASW TIMES, Front Page, By Edward Steinhauser

DEAD MICE: WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR HUMANS? by Edward Steinhauser.

No one is quite sure, when or where the rodent problem in ASW came from, but it had been kept quite sufficiently under wraps for a long period of time. The government felt they were keeping the rodent problem under wraps, but last year, the figures of rodentia were staggering: at least 20 billion non-native rodentia had reproduced and now occupied ASW.

Crops were decreasing, and the natural countrysides were being eaten away by these packs of rodents. The prices of various fruits and vegetables were skyrocketing, so the government took into its hands a way to sterilize the rodents and gradually reduce their numbers.

To this end, they took the lab mouse strain Black 6 and the disease mousepox. Black 6 are naturally resistant to mousepox, so it was deemed that whatever would affect the Black 6 populations would easily cut down on the rodentia infesting the wildside.

The purpose of the original experiment was to sterilize the mice. Since the disease mousepox was normally eliminated before it could attack the reproductive system, they took the natural mouse gene, Interleukin-4 (or IL-4), that controlled the cytokine and immune system within the mouse.

For several days, they intermixed the natural mousepox with the IL-4. After several days of this, they took 10 mLs of the newly formed virus and injected it into each of the Black 6 mice.

For the first two days, nothing happened in the mice, but what transpired over the next few weeks was terrifying beyond bounds.

The once non-lethal non-virulent mouse disease had turned into a highly infectious killer. In 1 week, 27 of the 100 mice were dead. In 2 weeks, 54. In the middle of the third week, every mouse infected with mousepox had been killed. Even mice that weren't part of the experiment in the nearby labs had died of mousepox infection. A disease with a lethality and communicability of less than 1% had reached 100% fatality and communicability.

The following week, before a second test group were to be subjected to the test, they were vaccinated for the pox viruses. When the experiment was repeated, 60% to 70% of all the mice died.

What scientists project is that, with the low amount of vaccines in the world today, numbering less than 1000, and the already low amount of people capable of accepting a vaccination, if smallpox were to be interbred with human IL-4, no human would survive. Within two weeks, every person would be infected and left for dead.

What is even more horrific about this is that the way to interix smallpox is simple, even capable for a civilian with hardly even any medical training to do in their kitchen sink.

(End of Article, possibly more to come later)