>I would not fear this virus for the same reason that I do not fear Ebola or Marburg virus. Viruses that kill quickly and efficiently do not spread as well as those that cause some disease but allow their host to continue functioning more or less normally (all the while exposing many more to the virus).

I disagree with that argument.
Its almost right, but I think its perniciously wrong.

Its true that the most dangerous viruses, all other things being equal, are the ones with longer incubation time. Outbreaks of Ebola have tended to wipe out an isolated population, and quickly 'burn themselves out'; this has substantially reduced their threat.

But that 'all other things being equal' part is important.
There's nothing that says a virus that kills quickly and efficiently can't also spread well.

You could have a flu virus, with 50% mortality, that is asymptotic for 5 days, and then kills quickly; but if that virus easily transfers airborne, it could still spread well. The question is always whether each infected person can infect - on average - a little more than one other person; there's no reason a highly contagious flu couldn't do this in a 5 day window, and that makes it very scary.

In simple epidemic modeling terms, you've got a contagion rate Beta, and a recovery rate Gamma. With fixed Beta, lower Gamma causes more spreading. But even with a fairly high recovery rate, if Beta is high enough, the disease will spread effectively.

If humanity should fear anything, its viruses like these. Its way above nuclear meltdowns, or climate change, in that respect.

>One final note on the bioweapon/bioterror angle: if you follow the thinking of the people that actually contemplate the use of bioweapons, you'll find that bioweapons are only ever considered as denial-of-area or knock-down agents.

Have you ever heard of these guys? : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo
These crazy bastards did a sarin attack on the Tokyo subway.
Wiki says: "Over the next week, the full scale of Aum's activities was revealed for the first time. At the cult's headquarters in Kamikuishiki on the foot of Mount Fuji, police found explosives, chemical weapons and biological warfare agents, such as anthrax and Ebola cultures, and a Russian Mil Mi-17 military helicopter. The Ebola virus was delivered from Zaire in 1994"

I don't know how well sourced that wikipedia article is, but I've certainly read many places that they sent people to source Ebola in Africa.

These were not logical people, rationally planning military use scenarios, and weren't thinking about things like 'denial-of-area'.
There aren't many people like that in the world, but there's some.

>It won't wipe out the human race, but it does have a good chance of setting humanity back a decade or two

3 billion deaths would be an unprecedented human tragedy. Its like flipping a coin, for each of your loved ones lives, if you want to personalise it. Its completely horrific, and we shouldn't lose sight of that, talking about 'being set back a decade or two'.

Furthermore, you'd probably be talking about complete social, economic, societal collapse. I'd imagine that would be very hard to recover from.

The prospect of something like this getting out is terrifying. I'm a researcher, and I really think we should be pushing forward scientific progress. But even the fact that there's a virus like this sitting in a lab somewhere is scary. I hope its got an extremely high level of security. What happens if a crazy group kidnaps one of the researcher's families? I definitely understand why there's concern about making the 'steps to reproduce' available.

Several years ago, Bill Joy talked about having to censor certain intellectual information, for situations just such as this.
I thought he was a bit crazy at the time; but with developments like this, well, maybe there's an uncomfortable discussion to be had, here; personally, I need to think more about this.

> In my mind, though, this is all the more reason to publish this research and, while we're at it, pour some more money into the worldwide flu monitoring network.

Flu monitoring is probably not going to stop something like this if it appears in the wild - at least in terms of intervening to quarantine a particular variant.

If you look at the swine flu outbreak, in the early stages they were worried that the mortality was high (they didn't have good data). But no attempt at containment was made; the time window for containment was effectively gone, by the time the virus came to our attention. (I can't find a source for this, but that's my recollection). (EDIT: Here's one source: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/07/...)

I attended a talk a couple of years ago:
http://netsci2010.net/abstracts/Bajardi.htm

That group has what seems to be one of the best global epidemic models; the point of the talk was that even shutting down air travel was very unlikely to stop the spread of the flu they were studying, in response to detecting an outbreak; its just very hard to stop these things spreading.

I should say - I'm not an expert on biological epidemiology or anything, and I'd love to be told I'm wrong about any of this.