Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Controversial bird flu studies raise complex problem, defy easy solutions: WHO

Controversial bird flu studies that are pitting influenza researchers and scientific journals against biosecurity experts raise complex issues and should not be framed in simplistic terms by proponents or opponents of their publication, a World Health Organization official suggests.

While it's tempting to boil the arguments down to a single issue — the evils of censorship, the sanctity of open science, the dangers of bioterrorism — to do so ignores the many difficult questions that the scientific, public health and security worlds need to work through to forge a path forward, Dr. Keiji Fukuda said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

Fukuda, an influenza expert and the WHO's assistant director-general for health security and environment, was commenting on the roiling controversy surrounding two unpublished studies about the H5N1 flu virus.
The studies reportedly detail how researchers in the Netherlands and the United States pushed H5N1 avian influenza viruses to evolve to the point where they became easily transmissible among ferrets. Ferrets are considered the best animal model for predicting how a flu virus will act in people.

The studies, in the publishing pipelines of the journals Nature and Science, drew the concern of an expert group that advises the U.S. on biosecurity issues and so-called dual-use research — legitimate scientific work that could be used for nefarious purposes.

The National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity urged the U.S. government — which followed the advice — to ask the journals not to publish the guts of the studies, suggesting they are in effect recipes for how to turn H5N1 viruses into a potentially potent bioterrorism weapon. More

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