WHO Investigates Claims That Swine Flu Resulted From Human Error 249
Tom DBA writes "Bloomberg reports on claims that the swine flu could have been accidentally made in a lab, which are now being investigated by the World Health Organization. Quoting: 'Adrian Gibbs, 75, who collaborated on research that led to the development of Roche Holding AG's Tamiflu drug, said in an interview today that he intends to publish a report suggesting the new strain may have accidentally evolved in eggs scientists use to grow viruses and drugmakers use to make vaccines. Gibbs said that he came to his conclusion as part of an effort to trace the virus's origins by analyzing its genetic blueprint. ... Gibbs and two colleagues analyzed the publicly available sequences of hundreds of amino acids coded by each of the flu virus's eight genes. ... [The CDC's Nancy Cox says] since researchers don't have samples of swine flu viruses from South America and Africa, where the new strain may have evolved, those regions can't be ruled out as natural sources for the new flu.'"
Time has a related story evaluating the World Health Organization's response to H1N1.
Re:First plot! (Score:0, Interesting)
Swine Flu is a government media conspiracy to halt the flow of Mexico's tourism dollars as punishment for embarassing America with regards to drug demand and the fact that 95% of guns used in Mexican border crime are procured in America.
There is a bright side to all of this: Cheap bacon and pork chops!
Whoopsie (Score:3, Interesting)
If so it didn't work very well...
Re:So . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
I mentioned this when the media was powering up the hysteria machine.
Many government stockpiles of Tamiflu from the last pandemic that according to the "experts" was dead set going to "wipe us out" (lol) are expiring right now. Many governments were *not* going to restock to previous levels due to the enourmous cost [google.com].
Guess that's changed now huh?
Roche might just have the best marketing department in the world. Even better than Merck [google.com] - Just incase *anybody* tries to make excuses that nobody would stoop so low as to do as the article suggests on purpose, there's the type of entity being dealt with so check your "never attribute incompetence to malice" mindless drek at the door thanks (just preempting, sorry).
- Works a little to close to big pharma for comfort.
I still remember when HIV was blamed on the US gov (Score:2, Interesting)
So, I wouldn't put it past anyone to release a virus... by mistake or on purpose.
Media grab attempt (Score:5, Interesting)
Anon because I played a role in what will be the official response to this claim.
This claim is bullshit. There is *no evidence* to support his claims.
Science progresses when you come up with a credible theory. It makes testable claims based on actual evidence, the current theories fail to explain it, and you have to come up with a new explanation.
This isn't that. This is just a silly idea. It generates press, it eats up valuable time from the members of the flu community, and it will amount to nothing.
No one denies that the current virus is weird. But weird doesn't mean man-made. This is not the first time that Adrian Gibbs has been at odds with the flu community, and he is yet to present credible scientific claim based on fact.
The burden of proof lies with the person who puts forward the wild idea. Once you know that reassortant viruses like this one have been in the swine population for at least the last 10 years, and that the most recent pandemic virus (1968) also came from swine, it is going to take a mountain of evidence to prove this.
It would be impossible to prove that this virus didn't come from a man-made source, so the tin-foil hat brigade will never be satisfied.
For the rest of the population - this is a media grab attempt, and has no basis in fact. Please treat it as such.
Re:Tinfoil hat wearing crowd said this was man-mad (Score:2, Interesting)
"Where the train goes off the rails is where a conspiracy theory requires that massive numbers of people are keeping their mouths shut about some grand plan that they're a small part of. That can be done for a short time, but eventually every secret that has more than about 3 people in on it comes out."
Thank you. I've always been amazed by theories that posit that a cabal of people are so sophisticated that they are completely fooling everybody in the world - EXCEPT those with such clarity of vision and acute mental powers so as to see and understand the conspiracy completely.
"Everyone is stupid but the conspirators and me. And I'm smarter than both."
Even if this were proved to be true... (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if this were true, does that mean we should stop doing research on virus and vaccine ? Of course not !
Maybe confinment of labs should be improved if this were proven to be true. However, I prefer to live in the XXI century where smallpox has been eradicated thanks to Pasteur rather than banning all this research and having a life expectancy of 40 years.
PS: I am a biologist and have worked in confined labs.
Maybe the next one WILL be... (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems unlikely that this one was made in a lab, by accident or otherwise. Pigs, which swap Influenza both with humans and passing birds, are a natural place for this sort of mixing to occur. But given that it could have happened by a double accident in a sloppy lab (first getting two strains into the same egg, then getting a worker exposed to the result before it's harvested and killed to make vaccine material) it's worth checking.
But announcing it this way just broke security-by-obscurity on a way to make a pandemic on-the-cheap. Fertile eggs, samples of live viruses you want to hybridize, and a minimum of additional equipment and it's something virtually anybody with a spare room and a bit of time and effort could do. As a side-effect it gives them the material to make a vaccine for their own people in the process, long before the virus needs to be tried out on test subjects to test for virulence.
So while this one is no doubt an accident - most likely in the wild, MAYBE in a vaccine lab - don't be surprised if a later one is not. The press coverage of this speculation just showed the world how to replicate the first chapters of "The Stand" on a minimal budget.
Re:Tinfoil hat wearing crowd said this was man-mad (Score:4, Interesting)
Where the train goes off the rails is where a conspiracy theory requires that massive numbers of people are keeping their mouths shut about some grand plan that they're a small part of.
Although you're right when it comes to 99% of conspiracy theories, in this case _your_ train goes off the rails assuming you need 'massive numbers of people' to pull off engineering a new influenza virus and setting it free. All it takes is a few execs who know a few scientists they can blindly trust, and if everyone involved knows that all the others share the same evil ethics, it isn't unlikely at all a scheme could be devised to create a virus like this without anyone else knowing about it. I'd say you'd need no more than 10 people, probably less.
Try googling seroquel if you think the pharmacy industry doesn't do evil things and tries to cover them up afterwards. It's an anti-deprissant that showed serious health risks and side-effects in preliminary lab studies. These studies somehow dissappeared, the side-effects where never mentioned on any package leaflet, and the drug was approved in multiple countries. Many people who used this drug developed diabetes or ended up seriously overweight, exactly the side-effects described in the lab studies, until these studies somehow surfaced, years later. You explain me how it would be more difficult to cover up creating a new strain of influence, than to have lab studies dissappear in order to get your drug approved.
Re:Media grab attempt (Score:1, Interesting)
Replying to myself with the last spat between Adrian Gibbs and the flu community.
The last time he pulled a stunt like this, it was to claim that the HA gene of the 1918 pandemic was a result of intragenic recombination between a swine and human virus.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/293/5536/1842
That claim was debunked due to the screwy analysis he used to arrive at his conclusion:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/296/5566/211a
He next claimed that 1918 internal genes had been circulating in mammals:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7088/abs/nature04823.html
This was never supported, and is in direct opposition to every other result ever published by *any* other lab that has researched the 1918 virus.
Adrian Gibbs abuses his connections to publish quack science in high profile journals. This time is no different.
It's not controversial if it's just wrong.