Bird Flu Paper Going To Press
In December I wrote about how two different research groups had stitched together new varieties of the deadly H5N1 Bird Flu that were easily transmissible between ferrets through droplets in the air. Many were worried that if their results were published, terrorists could use the data to create a devastating biological weapon. As a result, publication of both papers was put on hold. However, the paper by Yoshihiro Kawaoka and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Tokyo, is now set to be published in Nature (see “One H5N1 Paper Finally Goes to Press,” in Science, May 4, 2012). The second paper, by Ron Fouchier and colleagues at Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, Netherlands, has been delayed by bureaucratic red tape, but is slated to be published by Science.
Wild avian influenza strains are currently not easily transmissible from person to person and are overwhelmingly contracted only through direct contact with infected birds. Yet for those who do contract the virus, the mortality rate has been terrifyingly high (around 60%). Virologists have been predicting for years that this or another highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) strain could mutate and develop person-to-person transmissibility (like seasonal flus), leading to a deadly pandemic like the one in 1918, which killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide.
Scientists argue that research like that conducted by the Fouchier and Kawaoka teams is essential for