Details of the Second Controversial Mutant Bird Flu Study Finally Published 78
An anonymous reader writes "The second of the two controversial bird flu studies once considered too risky to publish in fears that they would trigger a potentially devastating global influenza epidemic was published Thursday. The study describes how scientists created H5N1 virus strains that could become capable of airborne transmission between mammals. Scientists said that the findings, which had been censored for half a year, could help them detect dangerous virus strains in nature."
not really a bio weapon we promise (Score:0, Interesting)
What we really meant to say is we created a dangerous strain and will release it in the wild. We were doing it for research purposes only of course so don't worry about any kind of accidental release.
Re:two mad scientist walk into a bar (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Again. (Score:2, Interesting)
The people doing this research are also capable of creating vaccines, etc.
[citation needed]. Would appreciate if you can find citations showing their capability to produce quantities large enough if needed in a pandemic.
Re:Again. (Score:5, Interesting)
In my opinion, anyone purposely working on a more dangerous version of a deadly flu for very close to no reason, they should be shut down immediately.
Well, it's a good thing they have a really good reason then. They want to prevent a pandemic flu.
A pandemic is caused by a novel influenza virus that we are not immune to, and can spread itself quickly from infected host to uninfected human via airborne droplets.
As you pointed out, viruses do not die. The host's autoimmune system either learns how to control the more lethal strains, or the host dies. And we've learned the host's autoimmune system can be trained by inoculating it with a strain of the virus that looks very similar to the lethal strain, yet does not contain the machinery that typically causes sickness or death. We call this process vaccination.
We know the influenza virus lives for a long while in a non-human animal population (pigs, birds, horses), slowly mutating away from something our human autoimmune systems used to be able to recognize into a new form of the disease. This is called drift. (Reassortment is another mutational path that leads to new forms of the virus.) Judging by the regularity with which we are afflicted by pandemic flu viruses, this seems to happen about every 20 years. As we approach that 20 year mark, the occasional cross-species infection will occur, as the virus hops into some unlucky human who was in direct contact with the infected host. At that time, it's evident that there's a new form of the disease to which we're no longer immune.
We also know that every so often natural mutations will confer the ability to become transmissible to humans via airborne droplets that are exhaled by a carrier. Once that happens, the virus is able to spread among humans very rapidly.
So there are two things nature needs to create a new strain of pandemic flu: novelty and transmissibility. Once we see the novel form, it's time to create a vaccine that hopefully will lessen its impact before the time it naturally becomes transmissible on its own.
But mutations are mutations. We don't know for certain that the mutant form that's transmissible is still similar enough to the novel form for our autoimmune systems to recognize them both (keep in mind that the non-lethal form cultured for the vaccine is already somewhat different from the lethal form.) So the researchers are trying to study the possible mutations so they can test and develop the vaccines before they're actually needed in the wild.
tl;dr - they need to do this research, or a lot of people will die.
RTFA! (Score:4, Interesting)
Unanswered questions (Score:3, Interesting)