tetano
Editor, Senior Moderator
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.341.6146.601
News & Analysis
Avian Influenza
Critics Skeptical as Flu Scientists Argue for Controversial H7N9 Studies
David Malakoff
Flu scientists are hoping to vaccinate themselves against another outbreak of a crippling controversy.
In a letter published this week by Nature and Science (see p. 612), 22 researchers make their case for launching potentially risky experiments with the H7N9 avian influenza virus, which emerged earlier this year in China and which some scientists fear could spark a deadly human pandemic. The scientists, who mostly work in U.S.-funded labs, also detail the safety and security precautions that they would take to prevent the possibly dangerous viruses they create from escaping from the lab?or falling into the hands of terrorists. In an accompanying online letter (http://scim.ag/fluHHS), officials from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) write that they will require extra review of especially problematic studies.
The communiqu?, the authors say, is intended to head off the kind of global controversy that in 2011 engulfed researchers conducting experiments with another avian flu virus, H5N1, halting certain studies for more than a year (Science, 22 June 2012, p. 1494). Critics charged that those studies?which involved engineering new H5N1 strains able to move between mammals, and not just birds?carried risks that outweighed any benefits and had too little public oversight.
?With H5N1, we were criticized for not being transparent,? says virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, one of the scientists at the center of the H5N1 storm and a lead author of the 7 August letter. ?So this time we want to be sure the public understands what we want to do before we do it, why we need to do it, and how we are going to do it safely.?
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http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/08/07/science.341.6146.601.full
News & Analysis
Avian Influenza
Critics Skeptical as Flu Scientists Argue for Controversial H7N9 Studies
David Malakoff
Flu scientists are hoping to vaccinate themselves against another outbreak of a crippling controversy.
In a letter published this week by Nature and Science (see p. 612), 22 researchers make their case for launching potentially risky experiments with the H7N9 avian influenza virus, which emerged earlier this year in China and which some scientists fear could spark a deadly human pandemic. The scientists, who mostly work in U.S.-funded labs, also detail the safety and security precautions that they would take to prevent the possibly dangerous viruses they create from escaping from the lab?or falling into the hands of terrorists. In an accompanying online letter (http://scim.ag/fluHHS), officials from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) write that they will require extra review of especially problematic studies.
The communiqu?, the authors say, is intended to head off the kind of global controversy that in 2011 engulfed researchers conducting experiments with another avian flu virus, H5N1, halting certain studies for more than a year (Science, 22 June 2012, p. 1494). Critics charged that those studies?which involved engineering new H5N1 strains able to move between mammals, and not just birds?carried risks that outweighed any benefits and had too little public oversight.
?With H5N1, we were criticized for not being transparent,? says virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, one of the scientists at the center of the H5N1 storm and a lead author of the 7 August letter. ?So this time we want to be sure the public understands what we want to do before we do it, why we need to do it, and how we are going to do it safely.?
...
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/08/07/science.341.6146.601.full