h a l f b a k e r yBaker Street Irregulars
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Whizzed germs
Break pathogen cell walls and capsules down and kill people with them | |
This is inspired by [ of ]'s poo cannon. I don't recommend that it's actually done, of course.
Take a few pathogens whose insides and outsides do the nasty or make people's bodies do the nasty to themselves. The usual kind of things, such as botulism, Listeria, cholera, and so on. Put them in a
receptacle of some kind and proceed to break them down with ultrasonic zonking, as the technical term has it. Then introduce them to the people you want to kill as an aerosol. They will proceed to die of the kind of thing they usually die of as a result of having all the various bacterial infections, except they will suffer all of them at once and the substances will take effect faster because they're not neatly packaged inside organisms.
The "beauty" of this idea is that it might not even count as a biological or chemical weapon because it consists neither of microorganisms - they're all dead - nor of synthesised chemicals - they're all biochemical substances widespread in the environment. So i'm not even sure this is banned under international conventions.
I'm not saying do it, i'm just saying it would kill lots of people nastily and effectively.
[link]
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If this would circumvent the chemical and biological
weapons bans, would it not be more elegant to spray
an area with a suspension of ground-up castor beans?
(I'm thinking ricin, not laxation.) |
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The funny thing about ricin is that there are a load of more poisonous biological compounds, but i take your point. It would depend on whether those compounds were in the bacteria. |
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//The funny thing about ricin is that there are a load
of more poisonous biological compounds// Can you
provide a list? |
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Port please, especially if you're talking about wine. |
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So essentially you will not be giving the victims bacteria, only the toxins bacteria excrete, the toxins that make people feel bad when they have a bacterial infection like influenza. Seems it would be much more effective to give them the bacteria live. |
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No, because a lot of the toxins are already there but not exposed to the outside. |
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Tell someone who has the flu that the toxins are not exposed. Live influenza bacteria are much worse than dead, vitrified bacteria because live ones keep making toxin. You would need a lot of dead, vitrified bacteria to do any damage, and it would be a one-shot deal. In the meantime, live bacteria would just keep putting out toxins. |
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Anyone who has ever played an RPG knows that toxin or poison's advantage is damage over time. ;) |
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I was referring to bacteria rather than viruses as on the whole
viruses lack their own toxins. |
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[MB], i think there are good reasons why the others aren't
mentioned and i'm not going to for the same reasons. |
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Is this supposed to raise the status of herbalism? |
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Anyway, legalistic evasion of international
conventions like the one against CBW seems
pointless: Don't they derive what force they have
from the condemnation of the international
community, and the resulting probability of
sanctions? In that situation, shirly it matters
more how much you offend people than whether
you violate the letter of the law. The trial of
Charles II, and the Nuremburg trials were both
illegal -- Clement Freud used to get quite huffy
about the latter. |
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[edit] Oops, sorry, Charles I |
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//a bacterial infection like influenza// as [19thly]
was too polite to point out, influenza is a viral
infection. |
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So, the idea is to isolate and purify Botulism toxin, and then inject it into people's lips as a cosmetic procedure? |
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Viral diseases (including influenza) don't tend to be toxin producers. Bacteria, such as the ones actually listed in the idea frequently are. That being said, the concept of utilizing microbiological toxins (botulism and penicillin are obvious examples) is baked and widely known to exist. |
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//good reasons why the others aren't mentioned and
i'm not going to for the same reasons// Ah, go on -
just a couple. You know [8th] will only start testing
on cats otherwise. |
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Nothing is going to raise the status of herbalism. It appears to
be made of neutronium and reside at Earth's core. |
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Anyway, the origin of this idea is the sterilised riot control
sewage, and the thought that trashing bacteria may make them
more dangerous. |
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Put it in a tube-like container and and some yellow paste-like dye. So instead of Cheez Whiz, there's Germ Whiz. |
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I'm not a biologist, so I don't know the details, but doesn't immunisation work along these lines? |
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Introduce dead microbes, or parts of microbes, to a body so that it can produce immune cells. These stay in the blood and neutralise the living microbes that can cause disease. |
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You might feel lousy for a while after being sprayed, but your immune system could get a boost from the target practice with dummy enemies. |
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Don't we already use bacteria to synthesise other types of "chemicals"? Penicillin comes to mind. |
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We can also extract LSD from Hawaian Baby Woodrose seeds, but I don't think the local Constabulary would allow that as an excuse when we get busted
"Oh no officer, this isn't strictly a synthesised chemical, under the specifically technical sense that we have just chosen to adopt in lieu of any suitably long and exacting specification that might otherwise scupper our immediate plans and continued freedom; Thanks, but we're off the hook!" |
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Similarly, I don't think the kind folks in Geneva would be particularly interested in the biased interpretation of what constitutes a biological or chemical agent in this instance - After all, Phosgene gas is made from just a bunch of perfectly naturally occuring elemental Carbon, Oxygen and Chlorine (presumably, under some clever circumstances, one might be able to get these ingredients to combine "naturally" into a deadly gas, perhaps, coincidentally, in a massive vat) one presumes that Phosgene is very much "on the list" in the banned gasses sense. |
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Is there something particularly special about "ultrasonic zonking" that makes it especially different to other extraction processes like grinding, swilling, heating, filtering, washing, titrating, etc? |
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//The funny thing about ricin is that there are a load of more poisonous biological compounds// |
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Ricin is really quite deadly when present inside the body; a single molecule may kill several cells. However, it's a protein, so if it's outside the body it is much less dangerous; it's not absorbed through unbroken skin. |
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Also from the wikipedia article, ricin is "several orders of magnitude less toxic than botulinum or tetanus toxin" - so there you go, Max. |
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(edited for clarity, with apologies to Alterother) |
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Unless your name happens to be Georgi Markov. A bit of
ricin whizzed into him very rapidly, but it still took a few
days
to kill him. |
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Yes, ricin is fairly innocuous, and the others are smaller and
nothing like amino acids. |
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Concerning immunisation, that's true to some extent but not in
the quantities i'm talking about. However, this is getting a bit
close to an idea i had a while ago which i'm not going to post as
it's too evil. |
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// i'm not going to post as it's too evil.// |
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"I have a beautiful reproof, but sadly this morality is
too small to contain it." |
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