Tempting fate is never wise; tempting a flu pandemic is downright foolish. Yet, it is impossible for scientists to understand influenza or create vaccines without at least some risk. The question, then, is what level of risk is acceptable.
On Dec. 20, 2011, the American authorities said they had asked the world's leading scientific journals to withhold research on the matter.
The request, to Science (an American publication) and Nature (a British one) is unusual. But so is the research in question. Two separate teams, led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of WisconsinMadison and Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands, have tinkered with H5N1, otherwise known as bird flu. The resulting strains are dramatically more dangerous.
According to the World Health Organization, bird flu has killed more than 330 people since 2003. That is a staggering 60 per cent of the 570-odd cases recorded worldwide in that period. (The actual fatality rate may be lower since non-fatal cases of bird flu are more likely to escape detection than fatal ones.) The Spanish flu of 1918-20, which infected 500 million people, claimed the lives of no more than one in five sufferers.
H5N1's toll would certainly have been greater than hundreds had it not been for an important limitation: Unlike its Spanish sister, it is not easily transmitted to humans, or between them. But if the virus ever evolved to hop nimbly from person to person, it too could wreak a pandemic.
That evolution has now occurred, helped by the researchers in Madison and Rotterdam. Each team engineered the virus so that it could be transmitted through the air from ferret to ferret (ferrets, surprisingly, are good proxies for humans). Details of both studies are still under wraps, but a paper Fouchier presented in September at a virology conference in Malta outlined his team's approach.
Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/opinion/editorials/Editorial+Flirting+with+pandemic/5933869/story.html#ixzz1jBkSlOIj
On Dec. 20, 2011, the American authorities said they had asked the world's leading scientific journals to withhold research on the matter.
The request, to Science (an American publication) and Nature (a British one) is unusual. But so is the research in question. Two separate teams, led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of WisconsinMadison and Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands, have tinkered with H5N1, otherwise known as bird flu. The resulting strains are dramatically more dangerous.
According to the World Health Organization, bird flu has killed more than 330 people since 2003. That is a staggering 60 per cent of the 570-odd cases recorded worldwide in that period. (The actual fatality rate may be lower since non-fatal cases of bird flu are more likely to escape detection than fatal ones.) The Spanish flu of 1918-20, which infected 500 million people, claimed the lives of no more than one in five sufferers.
H5N1's toll would certainly have been greater than hundreds had it not been for an important limitation: Unlike its Spanish sister, it is not easily transmitted to humans, or between them. But if the virus ever evolved to hop nimbly from person to person, it too could wreak a pandemic.
That evolution has now occurred, helped by the researchers in Madison and Rotterdam. Each team engineered the virus so that it could be transmitted through the air from ferret to ferret (ferrets, surprisingly, are good proxies for humans). Details of both studies are still under wraps, but a paper Fouchier presented in September at a virology conference in Malta outlined his team's approach.
Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/opinion/editorials/Editorial+Flirting+with+pandemic/5933869/story.html#ixzz1jBkSlOIj
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