<The researchers, from the influenza branch of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, will mate H5N1 and human flu viruses in a process known as reassortment. Viable offspring will be tested in animals thought to be good surrogates for humans, to see if the viruses can infect, can be transmitted easily from infected animals to healthy ones and to note the severity of disease each provokes.
In other words, the CDC researchers will be deliberately engineering viruses of pandemic potential. It's high-risk but crucial work, the influenza community insists.
"It's a dangerous experiment," admits Dr. Robert Webster, a world-renowned expert on influenza based at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.
Still, Webster has no doubt the work needs doing. Science must gain a better understanding of the menacing H5N1 virus.
"These experiments are fully justified, knowing what we know," he stresses, using a scatological adjective to describe how scared influenza experts are of H5N1. "This is the worst virus I've ever met in my long career." >
The problem with killing cancer cells is that in any individual, the cancer cells are slightly different and change as they breed, so that even if half the cancer cells can be killed by, say, a monoclonal antibody, the rest aren't.
It seems to me that these reassorting, recombining and mutating viruses are doing much the same.
The possibilities for different viruses are so prolific, I guess, that the labs won't be able to find and test more than a few. Having found virulent strains, they could develop vaccines for them, then release the virus to the wild and make a fortune selling the vaccine to the doomed.
I have often wondered whether the computer anti-virus companies haven't been quite pleased that there are people who go to the trouble of making viruses to contaminate and wreck people's computers. It must have been discussed in the companies as to whether somebody could investigate which viruses would work in the wild and the anti-virus company could come up with a solution before the virus is made by somebody. I wonder if any such investigations have resulted in "accidental" release.
We know that viruses that kill a high proportion of people are achievable [see bubonic plague in Europe for example which might have been a haemorragic avian flu virus rather than bubonic plague]. What matters is avoiding them forming and propagating and if they do, having a vaccine to kill them.
Avoiding them forming means keeping animals and food supplies and humans in non-forming form such as not living with the hens, being vegetarian [if there were no farmed animals, or a lot fewer, the chances would be reduced], being Jewish [no need for pigs which seem to be a problem with their swine flu] and so on.
Avoiding them propagating means bowing at a distance instead of hongi, kiss or shaking hands as greeting. It means avoiding restaurants and dinner tables, where people sit in close proximity, saying words like potato, peas, pancakes, which are plosive sounds with tiny droplets of spit being ejected over all the food and into the air for others to inhale. Travel by bicycle, not bus, or travel in cyberspace.
Remember the guy who let the smallpox out of his lab [he killed himself but the virus didn't go anywhere - maybe there were a couple of lab workers died, I forget - Google would know]. The Simpsons principle is that the lethal virus they invent will get out. It seems a very dopey thing to do - there's the movie Jurassic Park as a warning.
Mqurice
PS: It was Birmingham in 1978 <The last naturally-occurring case of smallpox in the world was contracted in October, 1977 by a young man in Merka Town, Somalia. He survived, and no new cases were reported in Somalia or elsewhere. But ironically, in 1978 two more cases popped up in Birmingham, England, from smallpox virus escaped from a research lab. One of the patients died. The director of the laboratory committed suicide. These were smallpox's last victims. In 1979, a global commission certified that smallpox had been eradicated, and this certification was officially accepted by the 33rd World Health Assembly in 1980. > pbs.org |
