With a genetic profile of these likely mutations, efforts to monitor for the virus in the wild could be boosted. Such a profile could also help governments and vaccine manufactures get a head start developing a preventive shot before a pandemic has a chance to gain speed.
As Fauci pointed out in the press briefing, this sort of research should be closely watched and, indeed, debated. "The risk-benefit calculation is not always obvious," he said. But despite the risks—that bioterrorist groups could try to replicate the strain or that it could accidentally escape the laboratory—he sees the research as necessary so that we may better understand how the virus might evolve to infect humans. The ferret research was conducted at a biosafety level 3 (one step down from the facilities where researchers study Ebola and smallpox).
After controversy over these papers erupted late last year, a voluntary, ongoing moratorium went into effect on all the experiments that increased the transmissibility and/or pathogenesis of H5N1, Fauci noted, adding: "I think the benefit that will come out of the Fouchier paper in stimulating thoughts and ways to better understand transmissibility and adaptability and pathogenesis, in my mind, far outweigh the risk of nefarious use of this information."
See what we're tweeting about
7 Comments
Add CommentAgreed. The best defense is a good offense. And without scientific knowledge of the strains we have literlly NO offense against such "bugs". Any one who disagrees I recommend reading the Art of War
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat: how much more no calculation at all! It is by attention to this point that I can foresee who is likely to win or lose." -Sun Tzu
Why were Mr. Fourier's work kept a secret for so long?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy even waste the money, the whole thing was a bad bird joke for media attention and public tax funding!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe have so many other bigger problems to solve, it's hardly worth a comment, never mind an article.
A Drug Cure will always come too late to save Humanity
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn 1997 the pandemic was stopped in its tracks in Hong Kong. The system adopted was not reliant upon a drug cure but that prevention was better than cure. It worked and Ken Shortridge who devised the strategy was given the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize in medicine, The Prince Mahidol Award. By doing this Prof. Shortridge stopped a bird flu pandemic starting and which had the propensity to kill millions (the only one ever to do so and prevent the deaths of incalculable numbers). The premise was, ‘don’t let it start in the first place’.
Why has the establishment therefore forgotten the first dictum of medical health that ‘prevention is better than cure?’
http://avian-influenza.cirad.fr/content/download/1931/11789/file/Kennedy-F-Shortridge.pdf
And why have those who are advocating a drug cure not taken on-board this system that has worked? This question is postulated because the Swine Flu pandemic showed that with reference to the Spanish Flu in 1918 which took up to 100 million lives, that a cure would come too late. In this respect it was not until 7 months 1 week that a vaccine was created and then it had to be manufactured and thereafter distributed to the masses (a logistics nightmare). In the second wave of the Spanish Flu, after the virus had mutated into a human-to-human killer, it did its worst between week 16 and week 26, some 1 month 1 week before a cure was found for the Swine Flu pandemic.
Therefore whatever way we look at it a drug vaccine will come too late to save us, no matter who you are from the president of the United States downwards. Fact not fiction.
Margaret Chan, Director-General of the WHO says that it is only a matter of time not when the killer virus will emerge - may be next week, next month, next year or whenever; but it will happen sometime and such a pandemic according to pandemic researchers is overdue. Therefore we are living on borrowed time and we have to adopt Prof. Shortridge's strategy for the good of all humanity.
Dr David Hill
Chief Executive
World Innovation Foundation
I would imagine if terrorists used these papers to replicate the virus, it may escape their bio containment protocols (if they even exercise containment protocols), leaving their labs and infecting their scientists and inhabitants of that geographic region. Whether the military and world health officials from various governments have enough intel to identify these clandestine operations, move in, and contain such an outbreak, "sterilizing" the area of infection, remains to be seen.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyes, it is a danger
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBrought to you by the makers of the flu vaccines, nothing like a bit of panic to bring up sales!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this