Deadly modified flu virus could kill off 4 billion people

[SuckOnThis]

The young scientist, normally calm and measured, seemed edgy when he stopped by his boss?s office.

?You are not going to believe this one,? he told Ron Fouchier, a virologist at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. ?I think we have an airborne H5N1 virus.?

The news, delivered one afternoon last July, was chilling. It meant that Dr. Fouchier?s research group had taken one of the most dangerous flu viruses ever known and made it even more dangerous ? by tweaking it genetically to make it more contagious.

What shocked the researchers was how easy it had been, Dr. Fouchier said. Just a few mutations was all it took to make the virus go airborne.

The discovery has led advisers to the United States government, which paid for the research, to urge that the details be kept secret and not published in scientific journals to prevent the work from being replicated by terrorists, hostile governments or rogue scientists.

Journal editors are taking the recommendation seriously, even though they normally resist any form of censorship. Scientists, too, usually insist on their freedom to share information, but fears of terrorism have led some to say this information is too dangerous to share.

Some biosecurity experts have even said that no scientist should have been allowed to create such a deadly germ in the first place, and they warn that not just the blueprints but the virus itself could somehow leak or be stolen from the laboratory.

Dr. Fouchier is cooperating with the request to withhold some data, but reluctantly. He thinks other scientists need the information.

The naturally occurring A(H5N1) virus is quite lethal without genetic tinkering. It already causes an exceptionally high death rate in humans, more than 50 percent. But the virus, a type of bird flu, does not often infect people, and when it does, they almost never transmit it to one another.

If, however, that were to change and bird flu were to develop the ability to spread from person to person, scientists fear that it could cause the deadliest flu pandemic in history.

The experiment in Rotterdam transformed the virus into the supergerm of virologists? nightmares, enabling it to spread from one animal to another through the air. The work was done in ferrets, which catch flu the same way people do and are considered the best model for studying it.

?This research should not have been done,? said Richard H. Ebright, a chemistry professor and bioweapons expert at Rutgers University who has long opposed such research. He warned that germs that could be used as bioweapons had already been unintentionally released hundreds of times from labs in the United States and predicted that the same thing would happen with the new virus.

?It will inevitably escape, and within a decade,? he said.

more at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45797224.../#.TvpvlUeEOlA

[Makaveli]

Great news.

[Caligari]

Feel good story of the year.







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[Nembrionic]

Welcome to the news of yesterday!

[Mr Pheer]

I'm having a hard time pretending not to be excited about this.

[DWB]

Just in time for 2012.

We could use a little population thinning. Would work wonders for the unemployment numbers.

[VikingMan]

Only 4 Billion? Shame

[BIGTYMER]

Spray it from their drones and they're all set.

[pimpware]