Biodefense Panel Chairman Admits Bird Flu Data Will “Get Out”
Scientific data on how the avian flu can be altered to more easily pass between humans will eventually “get out,” despite efforts to contain the information so it cannot be misused by terrorists seeking to produce a biological weapon, a leading U.S. biodefense expert told the London Independent (see GSN, Feb. 1).
National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity Chairman Paul Keim stood by the panel's recommendation that key details be withheld in publishing research findings on the H5N1 virus from two different teams of scientists at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands and the University of Wisconsin (Madison).
Both teams were able to produce an airborne version of bird flu after genetically modifying the virus just five times. H5N1 has a mortality rate close to 60 percent in humans, though infection is rare.
Neither team’s research has been published yet, but the scientific journals that received the studies have reportedly accepted the board's recommendation.
Keim said some study data had to be withheld as it is apparent the international community does not yet have the ability to respond to a human epidemic of avian flu.
“We recognized that, in the long term certainly, the information is going to get out, and maybe even in the midterm. But if we can restrict it in the short term and motivate governments to start getting busy in terms of building up the flu-defense infrastructure, then we’ve succeeded at a certain level,” Keim said.
A number of scientists, including those involved in the research, have argued that the board's recommendation is likely to set back efforts to prepare countermeasures to treat H5N1.
“The argument that we need this information to make better vaccines and better drugs does not ring true,” Keim said. “There are lots of ways to make drugs against this virus. The very drugs they were using against this virus were the very same ones used against other flu viruses. The drug-invention problem has nothing to do with having this virus to hand.”
The panel chairman noted the international health community’s slow response to the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak. “The very first time we knew that the swine flu virus [originating in Mexico] was there, it was already in 18 countries. I’m not confident at all that we have the surveillance capability to spot an emerging virus in time to stop it.”
Even if biosurveillance systems successfully detect the early emergence of avian flu infections, Keim said there was still the problem of an insufficient stockpile of prepared countermeasures.
“I don’t think we have sufficient vaccines. The vaccines aren’t good enough, and the drugs are not good enough to stop this emerging and being a pandemic” (Steve Connor, London
Independent, Feb. 8).
Meanwhile, the Canadian Public Health Agency said that any work in the nation on the transformed avian flu virus must be conducted in the highest-security Biosafety Level 4 laboratories, the Canadian Press reported last week.
Canada at present only has BSL-4 space at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.
Other research into avian flu is permitted at Canadian laboratories with lower-level BSL-3 biosecurity requirements.
The ruling was made after a threat assessment of the modified bird flu by the Public Health Agency, National Microbiology Laboratory spokesman Robert Cyrenne said in e-mailed comments.
The only known modified strains of the virus are held under high security in the United States and in the Netherlands, and there is little chance the two nations would wish to ship the highly contagious viruses across international lines, according to the report.
Canadian scientists would have to receive government authorization to bring samples of the modified pathogen into the country, Cyrenne said (Helen Branswell, Canadian Press/
Winnipeg Free Press, Feb. 3).
