Deadly virus could to wipeout half of humanity

http://rt.com/news/bird-flu-killer-strain-119/

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.

Fouchier said the strain circulates in animals, particularly birds, but rarely affects humans.
In the ten or so years since bird flu first emerged in Asia, fewer than 600 cases have been reported in humans. But the H5N1 strain is particularly vicious, killing roughly half of patients diagnosed with it. What stops it from becoming a major threat to public health is that it does not readily transmit from human to human. Or at least it didn’t – until now.

Researchers in Fouchier’s team used ferrets – test animals which closely mimic the human response to influenza – and transmitted H5N1 from one to another to make it more adaptable to new hosts. After 10 generations, the virus had mutated to become airborne, which means ferrets became ill from merely being near other diseased animals.

A genetic study showed that the new, dangerous strain had only five mutations compared to the original one, and all of them were earlier seen in the natural environment – just not all at once. Fouchier’s strain is as contagious as the human seasonal flu, which kills tens of thousands of people each year, but is likely to cause many more fatalities if released.

"I can't think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one," Paul Keim, a microbial geneticist who has worked on anthrax for many years, told Science Insider. "I don't think anthrax is scary at all compared to this."

Now Keim, who chairs the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), and other members of the body, have a very difficult decision to make. Fouchier wants his study to be published. So does virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka, who led similar research in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Tokyo, and reached comparable results. And it is up to NSABB to give them the green light.

Many academics and biosecurity experts are naturally cautious about releasing information which could provide any bioterrorist with a ready recipe to hold the world to ransom. Some argue that such work should never have been done in the first place and call for international monitoring of potentially harmful research.

"It's just a bad idea for scientists to turn a lethal virus into a lethal and highly contagious virus. And it's a second bad idea for them to publish how they did it so others can copy it," believes Dr. Thomas Inglesby, a bioterrorism expert and director of the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

However the very same data, if made available to the scientific community, could potentially allow humanity to prepare for an H5N1 pandemic, which Fouchier’s study has shown to be far more probable than was previously believed. Clamping down on freedom of information in the scientific domain may in the end leave us defenseless against the flu, should it arise naturally.

NSABB plans to issue a public statement soon, says Keim, and is likely to issue additional recommendations about this type of research. "We'll have a lot to say," he says.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21195-bioterror-fears-could-block-crucial-flu-research.html

Bioterror fears could block crucial flu research
17:51 21 November 2011 by Debora MacKenzie

"The potential for escape of that virus is staggering," says D.A Henderson, also at the Center for Biosecurity, who spearheaded the eradication of smallpox. If a highly contagious virus with a 50 per cent kill rate got loose "a catastrophe would result", he adds, especially given the world's slow and limited ability to make vaccine. There is a precedent, he notes: the mild H1N1 flu that circulated before 2009 escaped in 1977 from a lab in Russia or China.

The Rotterdam team will not comment while the review is underway, but at the conference in Malta they said the experiment was approved by Dutch and international reviewers before it began, and no one suggested it should not be published. It was performed at the equivalent of BSL4 – the highest bio-safety level.
Nature vs nurture

Researchers familiar with the work say the risks are overstated. "Nature is much more likely to come up with highly pathogenic influenza than we humans," says Peter Palese of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

Daniel Perez of the University of Maryland in College Park says publishing will generate more biosecurity, not less. That's because it will show which mutations to look for in natural H5N1 – and why more such monitoring is needed. "H5N1 is out of control," he says.

"A bit of a wake-up call on flu might not go amiss," agrees Peter Doherty of the University of Melbourne in Australia, who won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine in 1996 for work in viral immunity and now works on flu. "H5N1 is mutating a lot, and virologists need to know the ferret study so they can watch for those mutations," he says. "The real bioterror threat comes from nature itself."

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wissen/me...4.html#Drucken

Translated by Google

The content of physics is the physics that affect all people, "says Friedrich Dürrenmatt's drama relevant expertise. But on stage fail all attempts to hide the world formula - in the end makes the doctor astray, which is the only one really crazy, so on and off to destroy humanity.

One has only "physics" with "biology". Already it has a new problem. What would be the ultimate threat? The most perfidious and not even most exotic of all possible biological weapons would be a combination of avian and swine influenza. The former was not human-to-human transmissible, but deadly for more than half of those 570 victims who so since 2003 when in contact with chickens, ducks or other poultry were infected. The swine flu, however, was so infectious that it caused a worldwide pandemic in 2009. However, only one died less than ten thousand people infected so far in it.

Strict silence
What would happen if the bird flu learn to fly? So the ability to spread via droplet infection?

About this horror vision has been much speculation. So far, there has always been clear. In nature, it was highly unlikely, not in the laboratory. The science is still not ready. Until last week, a different note was struck. In a laboratory building of the Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam encamped by a man-made hand-flu virus, which "could change the world history if it were ever released," it said on the website of Science. Author of the article was alarming correspondent Martin Enserink, nobody would deny the in-depth expertise.

To combine the work group that has made it supposedly, the bad qualities of the influenza strain H5N1 with the potential spread of his remaining relatives, is led by Ron Fouchier. The Dutch virologist is a close associate and disciple of Albert Osterhaus, considered as a top expert in the field of avian influenza. Both have since imposed a strict silence. Or was it prescribed to them.

Mortality rate of seventy percent said
What is known about the alleged killer germ is based on a lecture given by Ron Fouchier has held mid September at a conference of the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza in Malta. He reported there from experiments with ferrets. Ferrets are the domesticated pet form of the polecat, the laboratory they have been proven for more than seventy years as an animal model for human influenza.

The Dutch researchers wanted to clarify in its core the important question of what genetic properties would lead to other influenza strains like H5N1 jumps from person to person. If you know this, one could predict the virulence of emerging variants, which is not yet possible. As a starting point Fouchier used a strain that we had missed the first three targeted mutations. This procedure allowed the pathogen already proliferate readily in the upper respiratory tract of ferrets. But a prerequisite for infection was still close body contact with conspecifics.

Because there with the targeted mutations are not really led the way, took a Fouchier then, as he himself says, "pretty stupid" experiment, which he wants to express that it required no special molecular genetic skills. To further adaptation of the virus in the respiratory tract of ferrets Fouchier just put on the evolutionary effects of mutation and selection. He dribbled to the animals his viruses into the nose. Sick ferrets, Fouchier isolates from the nasal mucosa was infected and so the next animal. After ten passages of the pathogen was actually as much: He was able to infect three of four ferrets were housed in adjacent cages, without having to have direct contact. So over the air. The mortality rate was allegedly shocking seventy percent.

Justification of such experiments
"This is very bad news," Ron Fouchier, this result is at the conference in Malta have commented. "This virus is transmitted as easily as normal seasonal flu viruses." Responsible for this are only five mutations, of which they had each been observed in nature. Further experiments would confirm this but still.

The only source for these claims is at present a report, written by the British science journalist Deborah MacKenzie for the New Scientist. Fouchier have confirmed their information orally, writes Martin Enserink Science staff. The responses of the experts are for the time being contradictory. Thomas Inglesby, Director of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh, holds the whole experiment for concern: "It is not generally a good idea, a deadly virus into a deadly contagious virus-transforming. And it is also not a good idea, then publish to be done. "Inglesbys voice carries weight because he is also a member of the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB). The Panel is currently blocked the publication of the experiments was planned in Science. The same applies to a second study that was conducted by a team led by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, and in Tokyo, with similar results.

Other experts on influenza like to see published the results of the Dutch necessarily. H5N1 could already by itself a lot of mutations accumulate, says Australian Nobel laureate Peter Doherty. More important it is to figure out which ones are dangerous. And above all: why? That alone would justify such experiments

Upgraded genetically
The fear, technical knowledge could fall into the wrong hands, is of course not new. In biology, there have been precedents. In February 2001, six months before the terrorist attacks in the United States, appeared in the Journal of Virology, a work of the Australian immunologist Ian Ramshaw, who experiments with mice had smallpox. His original idea was to develop a virus for the control of Australian plague of mice. It should make female mice infertile. For this purpose built one Ramshaw and his colleagues the mouse smallpox, a gene for the cytokine interleukin, which should strengthen the immune system against an attack from the ovary of the animals. Much to their surprise, they died like flies instead, and even mice that were naturally resistant or vaccinated, then gathered in rows.

Ramshaw says today, the sharp-made virus should never have been released, even if, after all, what you know, a transfer was impossible to man. Similar experiments on cow and monkey pox, which can in principle to the human being, he thinks highly dangerous.

Less concern on this point because the pathologist had Ariella Rosengard of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In June 2002 she published in PNAS, the results of an experiment in which they are the harmless orthopoxvirus vaccinia, which had been used to eradicate smallpox in 1977 as a vaccine, had genetically upgraded. It thus again resembled more the actual smallpox variola orthopoxvirus, with which it is biologically related as well as with the much less dangerous Kuhpockenerreger Orthopoxvirus bovis.

"We have communicated a lot"
Both work just did not call out from under frowning peers. It was obvious that such manipulations may not only serve the purpose of combating a pathogen, but also the sinister goal of making it more dangerous. Especially in the United States at that time, calls were heard such a "dual use" monitor sharper. Most was the proposal to publish no more specific results. Or to censor that decisive steps are no longer reproduce. Example was the dispute has been noticed for years fought the example of the pathogen of the "Spanish flu", which had called at the end of World War II at least twenty million lives. American scientists had succeeded in 1997, to isolate fragments of the lost remnants of the virus from flu victims in permafrost of Alaska. A group of pathologists to the American armed forces, led by Jeffery Taubenberger rigged the fragments in a high security laboratory, together again. In animal experiments, the reconstructed virus behaved as expected: it kills mice, chicken embryos and human cells more effectively than any previously known flu virus.

The Centers for Disease Control have been available to the U.S. Bioterrorism Act, that the eleven-coding regions were recorded for all eight segments of the virus of Spanish flu in the list of agents, where research and shipping will be strictly controlled.

Something similar could blossom now the virus strains in Rotterdam, and Wisconsin. The NSABB had very thoroughly dealt with the matter, said its chairman Paul Keim. They would relate very soon a public position. "We have communicated a lot," announces the bud.