The full details of recent experiments that made a deadly flu virus more contagious will be published, probably within a few months, despite recommendations by the United States that some information be kept secret for fear that terrorists could use it to start epidemics.<\/p>\n
The announcement, made on Friday [17 Feb 2012] by the World Health Organization<\/a>, follows two months of heated debate about the flu research. The recommendation to publish the work in full came from a meeting of 22 experts in flu and public health from various countries who met on Thursday and Friday in Geneva at the organization\u2019s headquarters to discuss \u201curgent issues<\/a>\u201d raised by the research.<\/p>\n Most of the group felt that any theoretical risk of the virus\u2019s being used by terrorists was far outweighed by the \u201creal and present danger\u201d of similar flu viruses in the wild, and by the need to study them and freely share information that could help identify the exact changes that might signal that a virus is developing the ability to cause a pandemic, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci<\/a>, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who represented the United States at the meeting.<\/p>\n The natural form of the virus being studied has infected millions of birds, mostly in poor countries in Asia, and although it does not often infect people, it has a high death rate when it does. If the virus were to develop the ability to infect humans more easily, and to spread from person to person \u2014 which it almost never does now \u2014 it could kill millions of people.<\/p>\n \u201cThe group consensus was that it was much more important to get this information to scientists in an easy way to allow them to work on the problem for the good of public health,\u201d Dr. Fauci said. \u201cIt was not unanimous, but a very strong consensus.\u201d<\/p>\n But the United States was not part of that consensus, Dr. Fauci said. He said he still agreed with the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity<\/a>, which recommended in December that the research be published only in a redacted form, for safety reasons.<\/p>\n The experiments involve a type of bird flu<\/a> virus known as H5N1. Of about 600 known cases, more than half have been fatal. The exact death rate is not known, however, because some deaths may go uncounted and mild cases may go undiagnosed. But whatever the death rate turns out to be, most researchers think it will be significantly higher than that of any flu virus, even the notorious 1918 flu, which had a death rate of about 2 percent. The 1918 virus, however, was highly contagious, and killed as many as 50 million people worldwide.<\/p>\n The H5N1 work, paid for by the National Institutes of Health<\/a>, was done by two separate research teams, at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.<\/p>\n Research on the viruses was voluntarily suspended<\/a> by the researchers last month because of the uproar it provoked. News of the experiments, which were conducted last year, set off public fears that the virus could accidentally leak out of a laboratory, or be stolen by terrorists, and result in a devastating pandemic. Scientists have been divided, with some urging that the results be published in full, and others saying the research is so dangerous that it should never even have been done, much less published.<\/p>\n