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Nature: Bird Flu Research Oversight

 

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BSL-4 Lab Worker - Photo Credit –USAMRIID  


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From the journal Nature today, a detailed look by Brendon Maher at how the NSABB examined the Kawaoka and Fouchier H5N1 research papers, and the long, tortuous road towards a final decision on their publication.

 

For those who did not follow this story, briefly:

 

In September of 2011, one of the best known flu researchers in the world - Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam - announced at a scientific conference that he’d managed to turn H5N1 into a virulent, and easily transmissible (among ferrets, anyway) pathogen.

 

(You can read about this work in Katherine Harmon’s Sci-Am article and in a follow up to this story in New Scientist: Five Easy Mutations.)

 

Halfway across the world, Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a highly respected virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine announced the creation of a comparable H5N1 super flu at roughly the same time.

 

Within weeks biosecurity experts began to question whether scientists should even be tinkering with this particularly lethal flu strain, and whether (or how) those results should be published.

 

The NSABB was tasked with reviewing these projects, and making a recommendation to the United States government.

 

After first recommending that the full studies not be published, the NSABB – under mounting pressure from a number of directions – reconsidered their decision in light of `revised and clarified’ manuscripts from Fouchier, and green-lighted their publication.

 


Brendon Maher explores the process by which these disparate decisions were reached, and the lingering concerns held by many involved in. 

 

This is an important story, and well worth reading in its entirety, so follow the link below:

 

 

Nature | News Feature

Bird-flu research: The biosecurity oversight

The fight over mutant flu has thrown the spotlight on a little-known government body that oversees dual-use research. Some are asking if it was up to the task.

  • Brendan Maher

23 May 2012

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H5N1

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