[D66] [JD: 117] Debate Persists on Deadly Flu Made Airborne | NYT

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            A version of this article appeared in print on December 27,
            2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
            Debate Persists On Deadly Flu Made Airborne.


  Debate Persists on Deadly Flu Made Airborne

By DENISE GRADY and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
5-6 minutes
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dirk-Jan Visser for The New York Times

Ron Fouchier led a team that took one of the most dangerous flu viruses
ever known and made it even more dangerous.

The young scientist, normally calm and measured, seemed edgy when he
stopped by his boss’s office.

“_*You are not going to believe this one,” he tol*__*d Ron Fouchier, a
virologist at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. “I think we have
an airborne H5N1 virus.” *_

The news, delivered one afternoon last July, was chilling. It meant that
Dr. Fouchier’s research group had taken one of the most dangerous flu
viruses ever known and made it even more dangerous — by tweaking it
genetically to make it more contagious.

What shocked the researchers was how easy it had been, Dr. Fouchier
said. Just a few mutations was all it took to make the virus go airborne.

_*The discovery has led advisers to the United States government, which
paid for the research, to urge that the details be kept secret and
*__*not published in scientific journals
<https://web.archive.org/web/20111227153536/http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/health/fearing-terrorism-us-asks-journals-to-censor-articles-on-virus.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=grady,%20fauci&st=cse>*__*to
prevent the work from being replicated by terrorists, hostile
governments or rogue scientists. *_

Journal editors are taking the recommendation seriously, even though
they normally resist any form of censorship. Scientists, too, usually
insist on their freedom to share information, but fears of terrorism
have led some to say this information is too dangerous to share.

Some biosecurity experts have even said that no scientist should have
been allowed to create such a deadly germ in the first place, and they
warn that not just the blueprints but the virus itself could somehow
leak or be stolen from the laboratory.

Dr. Fouchier is cooperating with the request to withhold some data, but
reluctantly. He thinks other scientists need the information.

The naturally occurring A(H5N1) virus is quite lethal without genetic
tinkering. It already causes an exceptionally high death rate in humans,
more than 50 percent. But the virus, a type of bird flu, does not often
infect people, and when it does, they almost never transmit it to one
another.

If, however, that were to change and bird flu were to develop the
ability to spread from person to person, scientists fear that it could
cause the deadliest flu pandemic in history.

The experiment in Rotterdam transformed the virus into the supergerm of
virologists’ nightmares, enabling it to spread from one animal to
another through the air. The work was done in ferrets, which catch flu
the same way people do and are considered the best model for studying it.

“This research should not have been done,” said Richard H. Ebright, a
chemistry professor and bioweapons expert at Rutgers University who has
long opposed such research. He warned that germs that could be used as
bioweapons had already been unintentionally released hundreds of times
from labs in the United States and predicted that the same thing would
happen with the new virus.

“It will inevitably escape, and within a decade,” he said.

But Dr. Fouchier and many public health experts argue that the
experiment had to be done.

If scientists can make the virus more transmissible in the lab, then it
can also happen in nature, Dr. Fouchier said.

Knowing that the risk is real should drive countries where the virus is
circulating in birds to take urgent steps to eradicate it, he said. And
knowing which mutations lead to transmissibility should help scientists
all over the world who monitor bird flu to recognize if and when a
circulating strain starts to develop pandemic potential.

“There are highly respected virologists who thought until a few years
ago that H5N1 could never become airborne between mammals,” Dr. Fouchier
said. “I wasn’t convinced. To prove these guys wrong, we needed to make
a virus that is transmissible.”

Other virologists differ. Dr. W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University
questioned the need for the research and rejected Dr. Fouchier’s
contention that making a virus transmissible in the laboratory proves
that it can or will happen in nature. But Richard J. Webby, a virologist
at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, said Dr.
Fouchier’s research was useful, with the potential to answer major
questions about flu viruses, like what makes them transmissible and how
some that appear to infect only animals can suddenly invade humans as well.

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