donnay
05-22-2014, 05:23 PM
Bird flu experiments pose threat, researchers warn
Karen Weintraub
Harvard and Yale researchers called Tuesday for an end to animal research into bird flu, worrying that the virus could escape and trigger a global epidemic.
Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, said he doesn't think the rewards of creating a novel strain of avian flu in ferrets – as a few labs around the world do – justify the risk that the virus might escape and wreak havoc.
"There really are a lot of things we can and are doing that are much more likely to yield benefits and also don't put anyone at risk," he said. "We should support safe and effective research rather than risky research."
Mistakes have happened before, said Lipsitch, who co-wrote an opinion piece in the journal PLOS Medicine with Alison P. Galvani, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health in Connecticut. There is some evidence that a strain of flu common since the late 1970s was released from a lab in China or Russia, he said.
Even routine strains of the flu cause about 50,000 American deaths a year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Scientists worry about a strain that might be significantly more lethal, such as the 1918 flu, which killed 675,000 in the USA.
The H5N1 bird flu is routinely found in wild birds and sometimes in poultry. The virus occasionally jumps to people – usually after direct contact with infected or dead poultry – and 650 human cases of H5N1 have been reported from 15 countries since 2003, more than half of them fatal.
Continued... (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/05/20/avian-flu-experiments/9138937/)
Karen Weintraub
Harvard and Yale researchers called Tuesday for an end to animal research into bird flu, worrying that the virus could escape and trigger a global epidemic.
Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, said he doesn't think the rewards of creating a novel strain of avian flu in ferrets – as a few labs around the world do – justify the risk that the virus might escape and wreak havoc.
"There really are a lot of things we can and are doing that are much more likely to yield benefits and also don't put anyone at risk," he said. "We should support safe and effective research rather than risky research."
Mistakes have happened before, said Lipsitch, who co-wrote an opinion piece in the journal PLOS Medicine with Alison P. Galvani, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health in Connecticut. There is some evidence that a strain of flu common since the late 1970s was released from a lab in China or Russia, he said.
Even routine strains of the flu cause about 50,000 American deaths a year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Scientists worry about a strain that might be significantly more lethal, such as the 1918 flu, which killed 675,000 in the USA.
The H5N1 bird flu is routinely found in wild birds and sometimes in poultry. The virus occasionally jumps to people – usually after direct contact with infected or dead poultry – and 650 human cases of H5N1 have been reported from 15 countries since 2003, more than half of them fatal.
Continued... (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/05/20/avian-flu-experiments/9138937/)