Researchers who voluntarily stopped work on a potent strain of influenza they created in the lab are hoping to end the moratorium on their studies.
In January , scientists agreed to halt their research on the dangerous H5N1 avian flu&#;or bird flu virus&#;that they had manipulated to become more easily transmissible from person to person. H5N1 became known as avian influenza because it thrives in fowl populations, including ducks and migrating geese, and while it caused severe illness in people, the virus was less adept at jumping between human hosts, and presumably, among other mammals as well. Since , when the virus was identified in Hong Kong, about people have been infected and nearly 60% have died.
But two groups of scientists, one led by Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands and another led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at University of Wisconsin, independently managed to create strains of H5N1 in their labs that could pass between ferrets, marking the first time that a version of the avian flu could easily spread among mammals. The potential for a pandemic with H5N1, which, to date, may have a 50% mortality rate among those infected, was concerning enough to
Lab-created bird flu virus accident shows lax oversight of risky 'gain of function' research
The story of how the H5N1 viruses came to be created – and the response to a safety breach – raises uncomfortable questions about the tremendous trust the world is placing in research labs.
Alison Young | Opinion contributor
This exclusive article is adapted from former USA TODAY investigative reporter Alison Young’s forthcoming book "Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk," which will be released April In this excerpt, Young reveals for the first time details of a December lab safety breach involving one of the world’s most infamous lab-created “gain of function” viruses – and the efforts that were made to downplay the event, avoid notifying health authorities and oversight bodies, and keep the public and policymakers in the dark.
Inside the high-security Influenza Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, two experienced scientists were pulling ferrets out of their HEPA-filtered cages on a Monday in December Another researcher, still in training, was also in the room to watch and learn.
One
High Containment
It started with a bold idea. “Someone finally convinced me to do something really, really stupid,” virologist Ron Fouchier told Scientific American in Fouchier, of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, and another scientist, Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, had separately tweaked the H5N1 virus — an influenza that primarily infects birds — in a way that made it spread more easily in ferrets. H5N1 is a prime pandemic candidate, and ferrets are often used as proxies for humans in flu experiments. When word got out that the two scientists were planning to publish papers detailing their experiments, making a blueprint available to the world, the outcry was extreme. The scientists were trying to better understand H5N1 in order to prevent a pandemic, but critics worried that their experiments could instead cause one — or provide would-be bioterrorists with an outbreak manufacturing guide.
The New York Times ran an editorial titled “An Engineered Doomsday.” The backlash was so severe that in , Kawaoka, Fouchier, and other prominent flu scientists voluntarily agreed to pause the transmissibility work. The debacle prompted an overhaul of pol
Contagion: Controversy Erupts over Man-Made Pandemic Avian Flu Virus
It’s a rare kind of research that incites a frenzied panic before it’s even published. But it’s flu season, and influenza science has a way of causing a stir this time of year.
Epidemiologists have long debated the pandemic potential of H5N1, a.k.a. avian bird flu. On one hand, the virus spreads too inefficiently between humans to seem like much of a threat: it has caused less than known cases of human flu since first emerging in On the other hand, when it does spread, it can be pretty deadly: nearly 60 percent of infected humans died from the virus. For years now, the research has suggested that any mutations that enhanced the virus’s ability to spread among humans, would simultaneously make it less deadly. But in a recent batch of as-yet-unpublished studies, two scientists - Yoshihiro Kawaoka from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center, in the Netherlands – have shown otherwise.
Working separately, they each hit on a combination of mutations (five, in Dr. Fouchier’s case) that makes H5N1 airborne (enabling it to spread readily b
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