This is how the world ends: with the best of intentions. Researchers in the Netherlands have created a version of the H5N1 bird flu which has been genetically modified to be incredibly contagious. In fact, according to some estimates, this superflu has the potential to kill half of the planet's population.

 

Security and bioterrorism experts are debating about whether or not the Dutch researcher's paper and results should be published, for security reasons. I suppose the theory there is that if the paper isn't published, no one else will ever be able to figure out how to make superflu out of regular bird flu. That seems a bit silly, doesn't it? 

 

But at the same time, it also seems like a terrible idea to publish instructions on how to kill half the planet with germs.

 

Bird flu has a huge potential to cause problems. Over 50% of people who contract H5N1 have died. The only reason it has been downgraded as a threat in the last few years is that it proved not to be as contagious as ordinary seasonal flu. There have only been 570 confirmed cases of H5N1 worldwide, compared to literally millions of cases of seasonal flu over the same time frame.

 

"Hooray," you might think. "We're saved!" But no: virologist Ron Fouchier has made a version of H5N1 which is as contagious among ferrets as regular flu. (Ferrets are considered an excellent stand-in for humans in influenza research.)

 

On the plus side, if they release the research, it will make it easier for organizations like the CDC to cook up a vaccine. Theoretically, a strain like this would be vulnerable to vaccination - although a lot of people would still die, because of the difficulties of quickly vaccinating the entire world's population. Heck, sometimes we run out of flu vaccine just here in the United States. The situation is a lot more dire if you're trying to vaccinate people in far-flung places like Micronesia, the Amazon River basin, and Nigeria.

 

This is of course exactly how Stephen King's novel The Stand started. Although the engineered influenza virus "Captain Trips" was built by the U.S. military, not the Dutch. And it proved to be 99.4% fatal, which is probably pretty unrealistic. 

 

(Also unrealistic is the scope of the bodies. If half the world's population died, where would we put all the corpses? Decaying bodies are vectors for some pretty nasty diseases, and I suspect a lot of the remaining population would die due to secondary infection, because gross.)