“Scientists have built the virus that causes polio from scratch in the lab, using nothing more than genetic sequence information from public databases and readily available technology.

The feat proves that even if all the polio virus in the world were destroyed, it would be easily possible to resurrect the crippling disease, says Aniko Paul at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, one of the researchers conducting the study.

The result has major implications for vaccination programs that have nearly rid the world of polio. “I think it means you’re probably not going to be able to stop vaccinating people even after you eradicate the virus,” says Diane Griffin of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Paul believes the synthesis method could be applied to other viral diseases. “We feel this could be used for ebola, smallpox, just about anything,” she says. This raises the worrying possibility that bioterrorists could use a similar approach to create devastating diseases without having to gain access to protected viral stocks.

However, infectious disease specialists emphasise that these other viruses are far more complex than poliovirus and, for the time being at least, could not be synthesised so easily.”

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2539

This is a crazy ass world we live in.

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