Sad news on the radio this morning. After the very effective rabbit calisivirus program in Australia in the early 1990s the government did not have the sense to follow up with eradicating the last few bunnies.
Like after the effective myxomatosis virus the remaining rabbits bred up and the population exploded again and they were resistent to that virus.
We now have another rabbit population explosion in place in Australia.
The CSIRO were trialling virus-vectored immuno sterilization (or virus-vectored immunocontraception) at the time.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2655714
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7831481
Anyone studying populations would look at humans now and talk of our population being in plague proportions. If we were rabbits urgent efforts would be being taken to kill most of us off and get the population plague under control. This would most likely be being done by virus technology. What are the bets that someone somewhere is working out the mechanisms of this technology for the human population plague right now? Like engineering mutations of H1N1 so that it spreads rapidly between humans?
Speaking personally I’m not hanging out to be one of the “rabbit” plague eliminated by an engineered pandemic but I can’t think of any way to protect against being automatically selected into the trial if it gets initiated. Living through a plague where most people die would not be something to laugh about either!