Bird flu virus research and need for censorship

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDFeb 1 2012

A group of scientists have been working on a genetically modified strain of bird flu. A federal advisory board declared Tuesday that the details of the research are a “grave concern” to public safety and should be kept under wraps.

In a letter released by the journals Science and Nature, the 23-member National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity said the data behind a new strain of the virus can be used to help prepare for a possible future outbreak. But the board recommended the researchers' findings be published without “methods or details” that could be used by terrorists to produce a biological weapon.

“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 letter read, “This is an unprecedented recommendation for work in the life sciences, and our analysis was conducted with careful consideration both of the potential benefits of publication and of the potential harm that could occur from such a precedent… Our concern is that publishing these experiments in detail would provide information to some person, organization or government that would help them to develop similar mammal-adapted influenza A/H5N1 viruses for harmful purposes.”

These concerns were first raised in December, after reports that scientists in Wisconsin and the Netherlands each created a strain of the influenza virus that is both highly lethal and easily transmitted between ferrets - the animals that most closely mimic the human response to the flu. A paper by the Dutch researchers was to be published in the journal Science, while the University of Wisconsin study was to be published in the journal Nature. Both journals have already agreed to postpone publication. But airing detailed results “represent(s) a grave concern for global biosecurity, biosafety, and public health,” the NSABB concluded.

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. “A pandemic by such a pathogen could reasonably be concluded to cause such devastation that it should be prevented at all costs,” he said.

“Although scientists pride themselves on the creation of scientific literature that defines careful methodology that would allow other scientists to replicate experiments, we do not believe that widespread dissemination of the methodology in this case is a responsible action,” authors of the letter in Nature and Science wrote.

The National Institutes of Health, which funded some of the research, agreed with the panel's assessment and made non-binding recommendations to Science and Nature to withhold key elements of the work.

But researchers involved in the bird-flu studies say censoring their papers would make it harder for scientists to share information while doing little to deter potential terrorists. “The logic in this work is sufficiently obvious that virologists could perform experiments similar to ours even if our method is not published,” the Dutch team wrote in Science last week.

Bird flu has killed about 60% of the people who have contracted it since its discovery in 1997.