Feds: Censor reports on lab-made 'bird flu'Scientists seeking to fight future pandemics have created a variety of "bird flu" potentially so dangerous that a federal advisory panel has for the first time asked two science journals to hold back on publishing details of research. In the experiments, university-based scientists in the Netherlands and Wisconsin created a version of the H5N1 influenza virus that is highly lethal and easily transmissible between ferrets, the lab animals that most closely mirror human beings in flu research. Members of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, which was created after the anthrax bioterrorism attacks of 2001, worried that such a hazardous strain might be intentionally or accidentally released into the world if directions for making it were generally known. After weeks of reviewing papers describing the research, the NSABB said Tuesday it had recommended that the experiments' "general conclusions" be published but not "details that could enable replication of the experiments by those who would seek to do harm." "Censorship is considered the ultimate sin of original research. However, we also have an imperative to keep certain research out of the hands of individuals who could use it for nefarious purposes," said Michael Osterholm, a member of the board who is also director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. "It is not unexpected that these two things would clash in this very special situation." The board cannot stop publication. Its advice went to the Department of Health and Human Services, whose leaders asked the authors of the papers and the journals reviewing them -- Science, published in Washington, and Nature, published in London -- to comply. The journals' responses to the request were chilly, although both hinted they were willing to go along under certain conditions. Dutch researchers said they "are currently working on a new manuscript that complies with the recommendation." The scientists at the University of Wisconsin could not be reached. The work was paid for by the National Institutes of Health as part of a large portfolio of research aimed at "pandemic preparedness." The recommendation from the board puts the federal government in a distinctly controversial and embarrassing position. It calls for a limit on the free exchange of information, something viewed as anathema by most scientists. It also suggests there wasn't sufficient forethought about what might happen if the experiments actually worked. The board reached the decision unanimously, Keim said. The substance of the experiments has been known to some members of the influenza research community since early summer. There are strong and widely divergent views of what should be done with the results. A few scientists say the work should never have started. About 600 people, mostly in Southeast Asia, have become ill from the H5N1 virus since 1997. About 60 percent have died. The virus is rarely passed from person to person. In most cases, infection requires close contact with sick birds. Because of its extreme virulence, H5N1 has been the flu strain most feared as the source of a possible influenza pandemic. What it lacked were the genetic changes permitting easy transmission by coughing, sneezing and touch. The new research has apparently produced those changes for the first time, at least in ferrets. Exactly how the key new mutations occurred is unclear, although it seems in part to be the product of chance. Influenza viruses are constantly changing in small ways. Simply infecting ferrets enough times with the virus may have been sufficient to allow mutations favoring easy transmissibility to emerge by chance and then be "saved" by natural selection. |