Can I create an unstoppable disease?

Question

Illnesses caused by bacteria can be held at bay by antibiotics, and some viruses can be fought with anti-viral medicine. However, I'd like to create a disease for use as a bioweapon that cannot be stopped.

Here are some things I'd like the disease to do:

Be transferrable through fluids
Be harmful only to humans
Cause death within 48 hours
Be untreatable
Be able to discreetly enter the body - the terrorists that use it don't want to simply stab someone with a needle and inject in the bacteria/virus
Be highly contagious, to the point where mild contact between humans will spread it

Is it possible to create a strain of bacteria or a virus that will create a disease that cannot be treated, cured, or even mildly inhibited by medicine?

First, do you mean treatable by modern medical practices? Second, for how long do you want it to be untreatable? Ebola now has a viable vaccine and smallpox has had one for a while, which are two of the worst diseases we've ever seen. We're pretty good at coming up with solutions to problems. — Frostfyre, Aug 03 '15 at 16:15
@Frostfyre Yes, I mean untreatable by modern medical practices. As for the timeline, I originally planned it to be "forever", i.e. the disease is resistant to any possible drug that can be thrown at it. A better revision might be ten years. I think that if introduced properly, it can spread rapidly and cause a substantial amount of damage within that time. — HDE 226868, Aug 03 '15 at 16:17
One more question: When you say "cause death in 48 hours," is that 48 hours from the start of exposure/incubation or 48 hours from the onset of symptoms? — Frostfyre, Aug 03 '15 at 16:21
A potential problem with your question is that it kills so quickly, which makes it self limiting. You are infected. The incubation window is really short. You start to feel bad, and a hours later you die. There would be a massive number of fatalities in the first 48 hours, more in the second 48 as people figure out what is going on. Everyone panics and stays home. Within a week everyone who had it is dead, and everyone else is self quarantining until officials get a handle on it. The closest to this was the Bubonic Plague, and that wouldn't be as bad if it happened now because of antibiotics. — AndyD273, Aug 03 '15 at 16:24
This question seems to be the inverse of this question about the credibility of a global pandemic. http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19945/is-non-manmade-pandemic-a-realistic-threat-to-modern-first-world — Green, Aug 03 '15 at 16:51
With what tech level? If you want it to be highly resistant to treatment I'd say you best bet would be some kind of modified HIV but airborne and engineered to kill more quickly along with selecting the strains most resistant to modern anti-retrovirals, I'd guess we're still 10 years from a full HIV cure. If you want it to spread really well you'd want it to take a lot longer than 48 hours from infection. If you need the 48 hour window for drama you could have a long period when people can spread it and then a 48 hour window from developing symptoms till death. — Murphy, Aug 03 '15 at 17:20
@Murphy I'd go with Ebola over HIV. IIRC, HIV doesn't so much kill you, as shut down your immune system so that everything else kills you. Ebola basically liquefies you from the inside out, meaning lots of infectious fluids everywhere, and some strains are already airborne. They are testing a vaccine right now, but it's been a lot longer than 10 years in the making, and if it mutated/was engineered enough to kill this quickly (48 hours instead of ~21 days) the vaccine could easily stop working. — AndyD273, Aug 03 '15 at 17:42
the fluids and discreete stuff are kindof at odds with each other. You can't discreetly project fluids into someone's body. — Serban Tanasa, Aug 03 '15 at 18:36
I'd like to create a disease for use as a bioweapon that cannot be stopped But why? Accidents happen in even the best labs, and unless you're a spaceman it's going to be military meatheads moving and deploying this weapon, are you so sure about the competency of your own troops (and that you'll never ever want to declare peace against this enemy of yours)? — MrLore, Aug 03 '15 at 19:31
@MrLore This is designed for terrorists. These particular ones aren't so worried. — HDE 226868, Aug 03 '15 at 19:32
Paranoid schizophrenia is a symptom, not an infection disease. — jawo, Aug 04 '15 at 07:17
I just want to mention, there are some denaturing and quiet simple chemicals witch can be used to kill ANY pathogen. For example hydrogen peroxide is that highly corrosive, it just melts down any biological matter (this is why it's not usable as antibiotic inside an organism, the amount needet would kill the organism you intentional wanted to heal.). This isn't a cure for your disease, but it helps a lot due it can be used to sterilize any surface 100%. This + ABC-overgarments will make it possible to avoid infections. — jawo, Aug 04 '15 at 07:25
What is the political objective of your terrorists? Unless their idea is to exterminate the whole of mankind, which would make them very weird terrorists, they would probably like to have a cure or a vaccine for themselves, before they start spreading their plague. — Luís Henrique, Jun 23 '16 at 16:49
Though this goes against what the comic was about I think this is relate-able. https://xkcd.com/1217/ — Nikolay Arabadzhi, Jan 09 '18 at 18:45
Worldbuilding: the perfect place for any crazy scientist that wants to end the world. — Morgan, May 24 '18 at 03:07

Green · Accepted Answer · 2017-02-10T21:16:11.657

Basic Mechanism for Incurability: Biofilms

A significant problem in hospitals is how to combat bacteria the form biofilms. These biofilms provide effective protection against a great many decontamination techniques both inside and outside the body. Let's build a disease around that mechanism.

Metabolic Characteristics

The pathogen's metabolic pathways closely resemble those of a normal human cell.

Detection Prevention

Since the host immune system uses receptors on foreign bacteria to identify threats, our pathogen has considerable ability to mimic the host's receptor. (The pathogen mimics the extra-cellular receptors that the host uses to distinguish between self and not-self.) Since the immune system recognizes the pathogen as "friendly", it is not attacked. Theoretically, it would only take a very small amount of the pathogen to induce death in the host.

Spread within Host

Form plaques/biofilms in capillary blood vessels that chock off blood supply to periphery areas. Once blocked off, the bacteria goes into anaerobic mode and starts pumping out a nasty toxin similar to botulinum toxin and more plaque to coat the infected area. The toxin kills off the surrounding tissue then uses the dead tissue as raw material for building a plaque wall. Hiding behind the plaque prevents clean up by the immune system or the lymphatic system.

Bacteria that haven't lodged anywhere continue to reproduce as quickly as they can. As plaques build up in major arteries and veins, the body will start to experience overall decreased functionality. In some/many cases, plaques that form in the heart will duplicate symptoms of Atherosclerosis, though a thousand times faster.

Symptoms

Difficulty breathing
Irregular heartbeat
Black pustules in the extremities.
Loss of cognitive ability
Severe organ pain
Black phlegm in coughing
Extreme fatigue
Severe itching around pustules
Irritation to the lung lining causing severe coughing

Spread between Hosts

Given the pathogen's ability to create strong biofilms in all environments, they may be able to last for long periods outside a host. Strong coughing by the victim will spread the pathogen through the air and depositing it on all manner of surfaces. Once the pathogen lands, it forms a biofilm sufficient to preclude destruction by bleach or any other strong chemical sanitizers. This ability makes sterilization incredibly difficult and allows the bacteria to popup again at a later time to reinfect a host.

Being airborne dramatically increases the pathogen's ability to spread itself. A good cough or two by an infected person in a large, busy international airport such as JFK, Paris, Tokyo, or Heathrow would spread the pathogen across the globe in short order.

Also, under certain atmospheric conditions the pathogen will form into spores and pop off the colony to float around and infect someone else. Consider how hard it is to contain a mildew or mold invasion. That's exactly how hard it is to clean up this pathogen.

Defeated Decontamination Mechanisms

Targeted viral infections - Won't work because you'd kill the host along with the pathogen.

Heat - In the food safety business, it's well known that you can't kill the spores that become bacteria. So even though a food may be sterilized after cooking at food safe temps, if the food is then left at room temperature then it will rapidly become contaminated again. Getting heat high enough to kill the spores usually means making the host into charcoal too.

UV - Biofilms take the brunt of this kind of ionizing damage. UV filters don't work against bacteria encased in UV blocking material.

Chemicals - Hospitals currently fight biofilms that evade such strong oxidizers as bleach. This pathogen has a similar biofilm capability.

Impossible to stop

By mimicking a host's receptors it forms a very difficult to hit target for the immune system. Any drugs that boost immune system function will not help here. By mimicking a host's metabolic pathways, any drug that targets them will also target the same pathways in the host, leading to death.

This one's pretty good. My only problem with the "impossible to stop" is that it burns to fast. The death toll would be huge in the first 3 days, and after that human contact would basically stop. If people went outside they'd do it gloved and masked. One reason the black death spread like it did was because people didn't know what was causing it, and fled the cities as far as they could go, taking the disease with them. Modern day, every news station would be telling everyone to stay inside, and the national guard would be out with blockades to stop anyone from traveling. No new hosts. — AndyD273, Aug 03 '15 at 17:51
@AndyD273, I've noticed the same thing about the spread where if it "burns" too fast then it dies out. The inclusion of strong biofilm colonies outside the host was my way of getting around this. Maybe I should have them develop spores and become airborne afterwards. — Green, Aug 03 '15 at 17:54
I like the biofilms. Hadn't considered it, and it might be enough to have pockets of infected material around to spread the disease, keep it going over the 10 years. You'd almost have to have it go in spurts (like the flu) or humanity would be extinct long before the 10 year mark. — AndyD273, Aug 03 '15 at 18:00
Am I the only one slightly worried that any internet rando could read this and kill us all? — Radvylf Programs, Feb 23 '19 at 05:04

AndyD273 · Answer 2 · 2015-08-03T18:23:18.080

9

Green gave me an idea, and I'm adapting this from a pretty good book I read recently...

Instead of bacteria or virus, I propose a fungus. Specifically, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, engineered to work on humans instead of ants. Unlike the book, the fungus would work similar to how it works on ants, and not turn people in to zombies.

Once infected, Ophiocordyceps takes over the hosts brain, giving them an overwhelming compulsion to climb to the highest point they can find, then sit down and die. The fungus would then sprout, releasing spores to infect more people.

The fungus takes over it's victims by mimicking their own bodies chemistry, so it's impossible to block. Wind would distribute the spores over great distances, and then be breathed in, or could grow through the skin like it does with ants.

The spores can stay dormant for a long time, waiting for a host to come along, and it wouldn't work on animals because of differing brain chemistry.

If someone had walked through a cloud of spores, their skin would be covered with them, and so skin to skin transmission would be possible. Likewise, some spores would be shaken loose, attaching to other surfaces.

edited Aug 03 '15 at 18:23

answered Aug 03 '15 at 18:20

AndyD273

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Ewww. . . but cool idea. – HDE 226868 Aug 03 '15 at 18:21
@HDE226868 Ophiocordyceps would be a scary thing, but it's not much more Ewww than what ebola or the plague does to a person. Less liquefied internal organs to mop off the ceiling, walls, and floor... – AndyD273 Aug 03 '15 at 19:00
This is basically the premise of the plague in The Last of Us. – Andrew Coonce Aug 03 '15 at 19:30
@AndrewCoonce Interesting. I haven't played that one since I don't have a PS4. It would be a little like that, just not zombies. From what I can see, the infected ants aren't violent, just not under their own control. They don't attack other ants. They just look for a tree to climb so the spores can be spread further. There is no reason to think that an infected person would be violent instead of essentially brain dead. – AndyD273 Aug 03 '15 at 19:40
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The timescale might be an issue here. How long does the fungus take to work? – Tim B Aug 03 '15 at 19:50
@AndyD273: The key thing is that the plague from The Last of Us is spread both by inhalation of spores and by the bites of infected individuals. At various stages during the plague's incubation it is: asymptomatic, then fever inducing, then mind altering (causing the individual to seek out and infect others), then mind destroying (turning the individual into a stationary spore colony). – Andrew Coonce Aug 03 '15 at 20:06
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@TimB Great question. In the book it started as soon as it hit the blood stream, and took about 4 hours to take over the host. This is all guess work since it currently only targets ants. Also in the book the fungus was very slow to mature (to give a reason why they became zombies.) These would mature and grow fruiting bodies very quickly. So say they bore in through your pores, start pumping chemicals into your blood to start the compulsion, and start extracting nutrients to grow. after a day they are sprouting and growing the spores, and the host is dying from the buildup of toxins. – AndyD273 Aug 03 '15 at 20:12

score 7 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 03 '15 at 22:21

One type of infectious disease that is completely incurable is prions. The word prion comes from the words protein and infection. Proteins are large molecules composed of strings of smaller amino acid molecules. These strings of amino acids fold into specific configurations that then perform a role in the cell. A prion is a protein that has misfolded for some reason and has taken on a new form. What makes the prion a disease is that this new form is capable of causing other proteins of the same type to also misfold and take on this new configuration. Thus the prion is essentially able to reproduce itself by converting the normal, properly-folded, and functioning protein into the prion form. This can cause a number of problems for the infected host. First, the protein is misfolded and therefore no longer performing the action it is responsible for in the cell, and second the prion form gradually builds up and accumulates into plaques.

Prions are responsible for many diseases in humans and other animals and are collectively known as transmissable spongiform encephalopathies. This is because all known prion diseases kill their hosts quite slowly. They mostly affect the brain where the prion builds up over months or years and results in the death of the neural tissue. This doesn't necessarily have to be the case though. A prion capable of converting normal proteins into more prions more efficiently could theoretically spread through the body incredibly rapidly and cause sudden death.

Prion diseases are entirely untreatable. Hypothetically a vaccine of some sort could be devised, but there are no extant treatments. All it would take to be infected would be the inhalation or ingestion of a single prion molecule. The infectivity would be very high if the prion protein was found in blood or mucus or other bodily fluids, both because the prion would begin to replicate immediately upon contact and because any coughing sneezing or hemorrhaging would release it. Potentially it could even replicate outside a host body. Prions are also extremely hard to kill. To render them ineffective you have to denature the protein, getting it to unfold from its infectious form. This requires both extreme heat and some potent chemicals making proper sterilization incredibly hard. Even a long run through an autoclave is considered insufficient. A prion could still be infectious long after its host died. The cooked meat of an animal that had eaten a prion infected corpse could be infectious even if the prion doesn't effect that creature. The prion would be species specific if the infectious protein were sufficiently divergent from its homologs in other animals.

I was thinking about answering prions too when I read the question, but you got here almost one year before I did. Have my upvote. — The Square-Cube Law, Jun 22 '16 at 16:49

score 3 · Answer 4 · edited Aug 04 '15 at 09:14

Old solutions aren't fun

It was already discussed in the question

Is non-manmade pandemic a realistic threat to modern first world?

that bacteria are quite limited due to antibiotics. They could be made resistant, but that kind of a pain to organise, and maybe stronger antibiotics could be developed to counter.

Viruses are somewhat limited, as once one of more people managed to survive it, a vaccine can be made. Recently there was news of a vaccine for Ebola being tested. HIV was one of the worst due to its propensity to metamorphose. But even that one seems to be receding against new treatments.

All that make it frustrating for your wanabe terrorists. Plus, the trend of viruses to be either very infectious OR very lethal makes it kind of hard.

Bio-nanobots

No, probably, if you allow a bit of time for the science to evolve... Nano-robots is already an emerging technology. For example, some will be aiming to kill cancer cells.

Giving it a bit more time, bio-technologies, should allow to build your nano-robots from biologic materials. And you "program" them to aim at destroying vital organs: like liver. Much like computer viruses, your robots should try to convert the internal body parts to reproduce themselves. They should be designed to circulate in body fluids. If the reproduction rate is well adjusted, you could have an easily infectious disease. Depending on the tuning of your robots, you can limit to certain organs, in order to limit the spread to other animals.

There is of course, the limit of treatment. Once they have been identified, some means will be deployed to fight them. Probably inhibitors, or defensive nano-robots.

But again, experience in computer viruses tell you that the best is to try to simulate an evolution. That the robots appear to change, while keeping the same functions. You take the risk of an evolution which could spread to other animals, but you gain a safety against counter measures.

Very similar to this: Cowboy Bebop: The Movie. The virus is a biological nano machine which starts off disguised as a lymphocyte. — AndyD273, Aug 03 '15 at 20:17

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 05 '15 at 15:27

A disease like this appears in the last two books of the Time Riders series by Alex Scarrow, although I forget its name.

Despite killing its host in mere minutes (by liquifying the flesh) it doesn't self limit because as soon as it reaches a host it begins releasing spores (I think this would make it a fungus). It also continues to use resources from the host long after they are dead.

The horrifying way in which it kills it victims causes widespread panic, so qauruntines are largely inneffective.

Because it is so infectious and kills so quickly, it is not safe to seek (and there is no time for) treatment, and researching or developing a cure becomes impossible.

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Dec 16 '16 at 13:32

You need the disease to take time, maybe make it kill in a week so it has time before it gets noticed. And the symptoms shouldn't be noticeable. You need something that can be linked to different diseases, or the government will make a vaccine sooner. And you shouldn't do through fluids it should be airborne.

Can I create an unstoppable disease?

6 Answers6

Old solutions aren't fun

Bio-nanobots