Thanks to Helen Branswell for tweeting the link to this Nature News & Comment piece by Declan Butler: Caution urged for mutant flu work. Excerpt:
Why would scientists deliberately create a form of the H5N1 avian influenza virus that is probably highly transmissible in humans? In the growing debate about research that has done precisely that, a key question is whether the public-health benefits of the work outweigh the risks of a potential pandemic if the virus escaped from the lab.
For the scientists who have created the mutated strains of the H5N1 virus, the justifications are clear. Surveillance of flu viruses could, they argue, allow health organizations to monitor birds and other animals for the mutations that would provide an early warning of a pandemic and enable authorities to act quickly to contain the virus.
That claim is meeting with scepticism, however. More than a dozen flu experts contacted by Nature say they believe that the work opens up important vistas in basic research, and that it sends a valuable warning about the potential for the virus to spark a human pandemic. But they caution that virus surveillance systems are ill-equipped to detect such mutations arising in flu viruses. As such, work on the viruses is unlikely to offer significant, immediate public-health benefits, they say.
That tips the balance of risk–benefit assessment in favour of a cautious approach, says Michael Osterholm, who heads the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy in Minneapolis, and who is a member of the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB).
In a paper submitted to Science, Ron Fouchier’s team at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, found that just five mutations allowed avian H5N1 to spread easily among ferrets, which are a good proxy for how flu behaves in other mammals, including humans. All five mutations have been spotted individually — although not together — in wild viruses.
Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues have submitted similar work to Nature, which is partially described in an online Comment published this week.
