From a conference in Malta dedicated to the flu....
http://www.eswiconference.org/
We have an abstract, ladies and gentlemen:
http://www.eswiconference.org/Downloads ... ews_1.aspx
Which led to this....H5N1: a persistent danger
Dr. Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands delivered a similarly strong message during his presentation that H5N1 continues
to be a pandemic threat. Fouchier has studied H5N1 in Indonesia, one of countries hardest hit by avian influenza. The island nation of 240 million people has had 178 confirmed cases of avian influenza of which 146 have been fatal.
Intrigued by evidence that classical vaccines were failing, Fouchier and his colleagues used a Hemagglutination inhibition assay to study the
antigenic drift of the new virus strains. “We discovered that only 1-3 substitutions are sufficient to cause large changes in antigenic drift,” said
Fouchier. Moreover, large antigenic differences between and within H5N1 clades could affect vaccine efficiency and even result in vaccine failure,
warned Fouchier. Indonesia decided to switch to a different vaccine strain. A “stupid” experiment leads to a valuable result Fouchier and his team’s biggest discovery, however, was based on what he termed a “stupid” experiment. He and his team introduced mutations, under strict laboratory safety procedures, by
reverse genetics into laboratory ferrets. They then collected a nasal wash from each infected ferret and inoculated another ferret after a few days.
They repeated this process ten times. The result? H5N1 had been transmitted to three out of four ferrets. “This virus is airborne and as efficiently
transmitted as the seasonal virus,” said Fouchier. His research team found that only 5 mutations, 3 by reverse genetics and 2 by repeated transmission,
were enough to produce this result. “This is very bad news, indeed,” said Fouchier. ■
http://rt.com/news/bird-flu-killer-strain-119/
Now of course the NY Times is more measured, but still....A virus with the potential to kill up to half the world’s population has been made in a lab. Now academics and bioterrorism experts are arguing over whether to publish the recipe, and whether the research should have been done in the first place.
The virus is an H5N1 bird flu strain which was genetically altered to become much more contagious. It was created by Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, who first presented his work to the public at an influenza conference in Malta in September.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/healt ... uci&st=cse
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/scien ... ne.html?hpFor the first time ever, a government advisory board is asking scientific journals not to publish details of certain biomedical experiments, for fear that the information could be used by terrorists to create deadly viruses and touch off epidemics.
In the experiments, conducted in the United States and the Netherlands, scientists created a highly transmissible form of a deadly flu virus that does not normally spread from person to person. It was an ominous step, because easy transmission can lead the virus to spread all over the world. The work was done in ferrets, which are considered a good model for predicting what flu viruses will do in people.
The virus, A(H5N1), causes bird flu, which rarely infects people but has an extraordinarily high death rate when it does. Since the virus was first detected in 1997, about 600 people have contracted it, and more than half have died. Nearly all have caught it from birds, and most cases have been in Asia. Scientists have watched the virus, worrying that if it developed the ability to spread easily from person to person, it could create one of the deadliest pandemics ever.
A government advisory panel, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, overseen by the National Institutes of Health, has asked two journals, Science and Nature, to keep certain details out of reports that they intend to publish on the research. The panel said conclusions should be published, but not “experimental details and mutation data that would enable replication of the experiments.”
The panel cannot force the journals to censor their articles, but the editor of Science, Bruce Alberts, said the journal was taking the recommendations seriously and would probably withhold some information — but only if the government creates a system to provide the missing information to legitimate scientists worldwide who need it.
The journals, the panel, researchers and government officials have been grappling with the findings for several months. The Dutch researchers presented their work at a virology conference in Malta in September.
Scientists and journal editors are generally adamant about protecting the free flow of ideas and information, and ready to fight anything that hints at censorship.
“I wouldn’t call this censorship,” Dr. Alberts said. “This is trying to avoid inappropriate censorship. It’s the scientific community trying to step out front and be responsible.”
He said there was legitimate cause for the concern about the researchers’ techniques falling into the wrong hands.
“This finding shows it’s much easier to evolve this virus to an extremely dangerous state where it can be transmitted in aerosols than anybody had recognized,” he said. Transmission by aerosols means the virus can be spread through the air via coughing or sneezing.
You are not going to believe this one,” he told Ron Fouchier, a virologist at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. “I think we have an airborne H5N1 virus.”
The news, delivered one afternoon last July, was chilling. It meant that Dr. Fouchier’s research group had taken one of the most dangerous flu viruses ever known and made it even more dangerous — by tweaking it genetically to make it more contagious.
What shocked the researchers was how easy it had been, Dr. Fouchier said. Just a few mutations was all it took to make the virus go airborne.
The discovery has led advisers to the United States government, which paid for the research, to urge that the details be kept secret and not published in scientific journals to prevent the work from being replicated by terrorists, hostile governments or rogue scientists.
Journal editors are taking the recommendation seriously, even though they normally resist any form of censorship. Scientists, too, usually insist on their freedom to share information, but fears of terrorism have led some to say this information is too dangerous to share.
Some biosecurity experts have even said that no scientist should have been allowed to create such a deadly germ in the first place, and they warn that not just the blueprints but the virus itself could somehow leak or be stolen from the laboratory.
Come to think of it, we're only 5-6 years away from the centennial anniversary of a most special pandemic!