Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

[tetano]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

Should Journals Describe How Scientists Made a Killer Flu?

H5N1 avian flu rarely infects humans, but it is deadly when it does. Since the virus first emerged in humans in Hong Kong in 1997, nearly 600 people have been infected worldwide and almost 60% have died.

The virus isn?t very transmissible, but scientists have long worried that it might mutate, perhaps through reassortment with a human flu strain, and gain the ability to pass easily from person to person like human flus, such as the H1N1/A strain that triggered a pandemic in 2009. More than a decade since its emergence in humans, however, that fear has yet to come true, and H5N1 remains only an occasional threat for the rare person who contracts it ? usually from close contact with a sick bird.

If H5N1 gained the ability to spread virulently, we might face another world-changing virus like the 1918 flu, but so far, at least, we?ve been lucky.

But just because nature hasn?t figured out a way to create an easily transmissible H5N1 doesn?t mean that scientists can?t. In experiments conducted at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, researchers engineered a strain of H5N1 that spread easily between ferrets ? which means it can probably spread easily between people. (Ferrets are a commonly used animal model for studying human flu.)

..

http://healthland.time.com/2011/12/...s-describe-how-to-make-a-man-made-killer-flu/

 

[Giuseppe]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

Everytime we cite this study, the Journal and the Authors we may contribute to increase their revenues and shares, making an undue help to their celebrity rank.

We are facing a situation rather different from old humanitarians like Louis Pasteur, Albert Sabin and many many others (the doctor that - for example - firsty treated a SARS patient in Vietnam and subsequently died for the illness): people used to donate even their life for advancement of science and progress.

In the recent chimera virus fanfare we are talking about multi-millions public and private investments readily to be transferred to patents for testing kit, vaccines design and above all, for increasing an already huge corporate profit.

R.I.P. to the Science.

 

[gsgs]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

science that sacrifies scientist's lifes or health or earnings or comfort is better science ?
I don't think so. Other criteria are decicive.
Especially in the modern age of specialization where scientists must be good
in their field but can no longer be good in all fields.

 

[Pathfinder]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

Thank you Laidback Al and tetano for these sources

Excerpts:

Q. What were the precautions that you took, if any, in the course of your research to guard against terrorism?

A. This experiment was not designed overnight. We started planning for these experiments 10 years ago, consulting with experts nationally and internationally about how to do this safely. We built special facilities to protect people against the virus and the virus against the people.

Q. What was special about your facilities, in the Netherlands?

A. The biosafety information can be found on our Web site. The biosecurity, I cannot release any information.

Q. Over that period, were there any safety issues?

A. Everything was smooth. There were layers upon layers upon layers of biosecurity measures. The design of this type of facility was such that it would be very unlikely for all barriers to break at the same time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/h...aramount-scientist-says.html?pagewanted=2&hpw

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

...the rapid spread of an escaped flu virus would make it more dangerous than other deadly pathogens. “When SARS or BSL-4 agents get out, their potential for transmission on a global basis is quite limited,” says Michael Osterholm, who heads the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy in Minneapolis, and is a member of the NSABB. “Influenza presents a very difficult challenge because if it ever were to escape, it is one that would quickly go round the world.”
...
Thanks to technology, science has become ever more decentralized, with obvious advantages. A broader band of researchers can produce deeper work, then share those studies with colleagues faster than ever before — which, in turn, encourages more discovery.
...
But the decentralization brought about by technology brings risks as well. Biosafety is only as strong as its weakest link, and an accident — or an act by a single malicious person — could have catastrophic effects.

http://healthland.time.com/2011/12/...s-describe-how-to-make-a-man-made-killer-flu/

 

[gsgs]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

how much easier would it be to create that strain directly,
without ferret-passaging, just adding the 5 mutations ?

From other experiments we know, that they can add these mutations.

And they could maybe work with mice or even cell cultures

 

[gsgs]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

prominent commentors including Fouchier :

http://www.virology.ws/2011/12/20/a-bad-day-for-science/#comments

 

[tetano]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

When it comes to bird flu, nature is the greatest bioterrorist

A few months ago, Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier made what he hoped would be a low-key announcement at a conference on influenza in Malta. After a series of painstaking experiments, Fouchier announced he had achieved the holy grail of influenza research: engineering the H5N1 bird flu virus so that it could pass easily between mammals. The "airborne" virus had been created, Fouchier explained, not by using sophisticated, lab-based genetic technology but by the relatively low-tech method of passaging H5N1 repeatedly through ferrets.

The significance of the discovery was not lost on the assembled delegates. If ferrets could be infected this way, then so could humans. Fouchier had realised the World Health Organisation's worst nightmare.

However, that might have been the end of the story were it not for a resourceful journalist at Science, who ? seeing a potential headline ? tracked Fouchier down to his lab at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam in November and got him to explain in more detail precisely how his team had created "probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make".

..


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/21/bird-flu-bioterrorist-h5n1

 

[Gert van der Hoek]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

U.S. Biosecurity Panel Calls for Asilomar-Style Moratorium on H5N1 Papers

by Martin Enserink on 23 December 2011,

The U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), which has asked scientists and journals to redact key details in two explosive influenza papers, plans to call for a voluntary broader moratorium on the publication of similar studies while an international debate is held to discuss how the field should proceed.

If influenza researchers accept the idea, they would agree not to publish studies about the transmissibility of the H5N1 avian influenza strain in mammals and not to present data on such studies at scientific meetings.

NSABB chair Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff told ScienceInsider that the gravity of the situation demands a thorough international consultation about the risks and benefits of such studies before more results are made public. "This is an Asilomar moment," he says, referring to a 1975 meeting in Asilomar, California, where, after voluntarily halting research, scientists drew up safety guidelines for working with the then-nascent recombinant DNA technology. "We try to avoid calling it a moratorium, but that's what it would be."

Read more -sciencemag

 

[sharon sanders]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

I really think a moratorium is ill advised.

It is censorship. Period.

What is next?

The real problem is how to effectively treat the 7 billion people in the world if any major world wide health crisis emerges.

Vaccination will not be possible for most of the population. The answer is an inexpensive and readily available treatment.

Statins for the treatment of influenza may hold this hope:

"..they (researchers) reported a striking 41% reduction in mortality.."

Please read:

J Infect Dis. (2011) doi: 10.1093/infdis/jir695 First published online: December 13, 2011

Association Between Use of Statins and Mortality Among Patients Hospitalized With Laboratory-Confirmed Influenza Virus Infections: A Multistate Study

http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/jid/prpaper.pdf

 

[AlaskaDenise]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

A Moral Imperative

Too often researchers hide behind the cloak of science and claim neutrality when critical bioethical issues arise. Now that the Fouchier team from Erasmus University Medical Center and the Kawaoka team from the University of Wisconsin have succeed in their quest to turn H5N1 into a virulent, human-transmissible virus, they cannot remain neutral. They now have a new categorical imperative. The only ethical path forward for these two groups of researchers is to turn their scientific prowess to the task of emasculating the H5N1 monster that they have just created in their laboratories.

Echoes of early nuclear research......

.

 

[gsgs]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

I think it is wrong to censure this material. .

now you're against censoring and I for it.
How times change

well, censoring data vs. censoring opinion ?

 

[Pathfinder]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

Debate Persists on Deadly Flu Made Airborne</NYT_HEADLINE>

By DENISE GRADY and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

</NYT_BYLINE>Published: December 26, 2011

Excerpt:

?This research should not have been done,? said Richard H. Ebright, a chemistry professor and bioweapons expert at Rutgers University who has long opposed such research. He warned that germs that could be used as bioweapons had already been unintentionally released hundreds of times from labs in the United States and predicted that the same thing would happen with the new virus.

?It will inevitably escape, and within a decade,? he said.

Full text:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/science/debate-persists-on-deadly-flu-made-airborne.html
------------------------------------------------

Richard H. Ebright--Biography:

http://www.waksman.rutgers.edu/ebright/richard-h-ebright

 

[Vibrant62]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

Just for clarity, It seems to me that there are 3 prongs to this debate here, and many (including me at times) have got the issues confused at times.

A) Should the viral strain Fouchier and others created in this research be used for further research? In my personal opinion the answer to this should be 'no' beyond creation of a seed vaccine strain in a BL4 lab, and any deemed 'critical' aspects of research that simply could not be carried out on any other H5N1 non-humanised variant; it is too dangerous a virus to be tinkered with... and there are many other substrains that can be used for researching critical questions and answers very effectively.
B) Should the methodology be published? IMHO, yes but with any critical parts of information omitted (does anyone really need to know how to recreate this specific strain again in a lab? If so why?)
C) Should research on H5N1 in general be permitted? IMHO Yes in BL3+ labs - with caveats from point A. It is too great a threat not to be investigated fully, and with all means at our disposal to find effective interventions and treatments and prepare for the day that this virus repeats in nature what was managed in a lab...

 

[gsgs]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

restrict it to a few safe labs worldwide

coordinate under WHO

make statements/treaties to cooperate worldwide against
possible bioterrorists and countries that host/support them

 

[Pathfinder]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

Hattip Giuseppe Michieli

WHO concerned that new H5N1 influenza research could undermine the 2011 Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework

Excerpt:

Research which can improve the understanding of these viruses and can reduce the public health risk is a scientific and public health imperative...

While it is clear that conducting research to gain such knowledge must continue, it is also clear that certain research, and especially that which can generate more dangerous forms of the virus than those which already exist, has risks. Therefore such research should be done only after all important public health risks and benefits have been identified and reviewed, and it is certain that the necessary protections to minimize the potential for negative consequences are in place.

http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=178936

 

[tetano]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

BMJ 2011; 343 doi: 10.1136/bmj.d8333 (Published 29 December 2011)
Cite this as: BMJ 2011;343:d8333


US agency seeks to censor influenza research amid biosecurity fears


Bob Roehr

Author Affiliations

A little known US government panel has asked two leading scientific journals to censor publication of research on the human to human transmission of the H5N1 avian influenza virus.

The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (http://oba.od.nih.gov/biosecurity/about_nsabb.html) made the request to the authors of the studies and to the journals Science and Nature after reviewing the papers before publication. It recommended ?that the general conclusions highlighting the novel outcome be published, but that the manuscripts not include the methodological and other details that could enable replication of ?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22200501

 

[JJackson]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

A) Should the viral strain Fouchier and others created in this research be used for further research?

For me, maybe.

They seem to have found a way of making a ferret2ferret airborne - or droplet borne - virus but the useful question is how many ways can this be achieved.
I have not seen their methodology but if you keep infecting caged ferrets and place others down wind-tunnel, but separated physically, you are likely to find air/droplet transmissible forms. If only one or two HA variants crop up it may be worth making,and stockpiling, a vaccine containing antigenic sites associated with the common factor - presumably the antigenic sites adjacent to the RBS are key.

In the case of the newly created virus it may be worth engineering variants to see what breaks transmisability, again attempting to determine how unique the form is.

My guess is that there are likely to be many ways to achieve the un-desired end which may involve mutations across multiple RNA strands and no lab, or labs, will ever be able to compete with the number of permutations mother nature is achieving in vivo. She just has too large a range of genetic dice to roll.

The key, as always. is the fact we do not have a scalable vaccine manufacturing capacity which can produce product to the timetable flu pandemics follow. No previous flu pandemic has unfolded slowly enough for our current production methods to produce useful quantities of vaccine before the peak has past.
H1N1(2009) could not have been kinder in its timing. It occurred just at the end of the populace Northern Hemisphere's flu season. The following Southern Hemisphere season was without vaccine and the vaccine began to appear for the next Northern season. In this cases the pandemic was relatively - compared to anything H5N1 might spawn - benign so we did not kill a lot of the southern hemisphere and when it began to come on stream much of the northern population did not want it, as the public viewed it as a non event.
I suspect they would take a rather different view if Erasmus' new pet were to get out of its cage.

 

[gsgs]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

a H5N1 pandemic probably starts in East Asia. Spring is usually the
thime when pandemics are discovered.
Then we have summer which is bad for flu, although when it's as
contagious as ****** then we can get summer waves.

But I think it's likely (~70%) that we would have 6-8 months
before the bad wave comes in USA,Europe.

I think they should try to make it less virulent in ferrets.
It is "mild" in pigs in Indonesia.

Once we have mild H5N1 circulating, it should replace virulent H5N1
in a threatening pandemic...

 

[Gert van der Hoek]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

Once we have mild H5N1 circulating, it should replace virulent H5N1
in a threatening pandemic...

Interesting thought GSGS, starting a mild H5N1 pandemic to prevent worse.

Unfortunately I think many vulnerable people will die even from a mild H5N1 flu.

May be less deaths then caused by a virulent H5N1, but is it ethical ?

 

[Vibrant62]

Re: Man Made H5N1 - Super Version

H5N1 - as we know from its behaviour in birds - tends to mutate. Vaccination / prior exposure to older variants does not protect from later near 100% lethal infections in ducks when new clades arise; the lethality arises from many factors, including the polybasic cleavage site.

A mild variant released may help to mitigate the degree of severity of a later infection, for a time, but only if it is a close match to any subsequent H5 subclade or variant that makes the jump. H5 will remain a threat and in circulation for many years if it suceeds in becoming humanised, a situation that could continue until H5 is displaced from general circulation amongst its various hosts. This is why research into universal vaccines (primarily for H5N1) is so important.

All one would do is release the 'winning combination' for human infections into the global H5 viral reservoir, and with reassortment, how long do you think it would take before other H5 strains (sufficiently genetically divergent to provide no cross immunity whatsoever) also make the jump?