TRIP

U.S. panel defends call to censor bird flu studies

Reuters Health News, 2012

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Ducklings are pictured at an incubating farm outside Hanoi September 7, 2011.
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A potentially deadlier form of the bird flu virus poses one of the gravest known threats to humans and justifies an unprecedented call to censor the research that produced it, a top U.S.
The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) set off a furious debate in the scientific and public health communities in December when it asked the journals Nature and Science to censor two studies on new strains of the H5N1 virus that may make it more easily transmissible in people.
"The potential of this pathogen, in theory, exceeds anything else I can imagine," Paul Keim, acting chair of the NSABB, told Reuters in an e-mail.
Keim explained his personal decision to support censorship in this case in a commentary published on Tuesday in mBio, the journal of the American Society for Microbiology.
The panel cited fears that mutant versions of the H5N1 virus created by scientists at Erasmus Medical College in the Netherlands and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, could accidentally escape the lab or be used as a devastating form of bioterrorism.
The censorship decision was a first for the panel, and it drew scathing criticism from many researchers who say withholding the information will set scientists back in the search for potential treatments and hamper public health efforts to track the virus.
The researchers involved in the studies have agreed to a 60-day suspension of their work to allow governments and public health agencies to debate how it should best be handled.
Keim, who chairs the microbiology department at Northern Arizona University, said the panel considered evidence that bird flu kills about half the people it infects, a much higher mortality rate than the devastating 1918-19 outbreak of Spanish flu that killed up to 40 million people.
Making this deadly virus capable of easy transmission in people was "sobering," Keim wrote in mBio.