Dutch Scientists Monkey With the Bird Flu Virus
In what may turn out to be a really bad idea, Dutch scientists have created a strain of the bird flu virus that maintains its 60 percent kill rate and is easily transferred between mammals, and they’re looking to tell the world how they did it.
In what may turn out to be a really bad idea, Dutch scientists have created a strain of the bird flu virus that maintains its 60 percent kill rate and is easily transferred between mammals, and they’re looking to tell the world how they did it.
Partly paradoxically, some scientists cite public health concerns as the reason such research is necessary. Flu viruses do mutate, and developing vaccines for lethal and highly contagious strains would be a benefit to public safety, provided scientists can do so before they escape the laboratory or fall into the wrong hands. –ARK
Wait, before you go…The Huffington Post:
According to New Scientist magazine, researchers in the Netherlands studying H5N1 — commonly referred to as the bird flu or avian influenza — have created a strain of the virus that’s easily passed between mammals, and it’s just as lethal as the original virus.
… Ron Fouchier, a researcher at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, led the team that successfully created the mutation. Fouchier presented the findings at a conference in Malta in September and, according to NPR, is now seeking publication of his results.
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Ear to the Ground
How the poultry industry complicates preparations for an avian flu pandemic.
Ear to the Ground
Scientists are monitoring mutations in H5N1, a pathogenic avian flu that may be moving in our direction.
Sources in Taiwan say that a previously unseen variant of avian influenza infected a 20-year-old woman in that country in the first recorded case of an H6N1 virus infecting and causing disease in a human.
Chinese researchers reported the first ever clinically documented case of resistance to the antiviral medication Tamiflu in patients infected with the H7N9 bird flu.
Chinese officials have closed poultry markets and ordered a mass slaughter of birds in Shanghai amid an outbreak of a type of avian flu that has not been seen in humans.
University of Tokyo scientist Yoshihiro Kawaoka is making the case for unfettered access to studies in which researchers made a lethal bird flu virus even deadlier by taking it airborne. To those determined to find it, the recipe is already available, he warns, and the mutation could occur outside the laboratory at any moment. All hands to the urgent task of developing a vaccine, then.
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