#Bird Flu Research That Stoked Fears Is Published
Bird Flu Research That Stoked Fears Is Published
Published: June 21, 2012
The more controversial of two papers describing how the lethal H5N1 bird flu could be made easier to spread was published on Thursday, six months after a scientific advisory board suggested that the papers’ most potentially dangerous data be censored
The paper, by scientists at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, identified five mutations apparently necessary to make the bird flu virus spread easily among ferrets, which catch the same flus that humans do.
Only about 600 humans are known to have caught H5N1 in the last decade as it circulated in poultry and wild birds, mostly in Asia and Egypt, but more than half died of it.
The paper’s publication, in the journal Science, ended an acrimonious debate over whether such results should ever be released. Critics said they could help a rogue scientist create a superweapon. Proponents said the world needed to identify dangerous mutations so countermeasures could be designed.
“There is always a risk,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, saidhttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/health/h5n1-bird-flu-research-that-stoked-fears-is-published.html..
