According to the World Health Organization, the two controversial studies that explain how scientists mutated the H5N1 bird flu virus into a form that could cause a deadly human pandemic will be published only after experts fully assess the risks.
The announcement, made on Friday by the World Health Organization, 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’s headquarters to discuss “urgent issues” raised by the research.
“There is a preference from a public health perspective for full disclosure of the information in these two studies. However there are significant public concerns surrounding this research that should first be addressed,” said Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's assistant director-general for health security and environment.
A deadlock was evident between scientists who have studied the mutations needed to make H5N1 bird flu transmit between mammals, and the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), which wanted the work censored before it was published in scientific journals.
Last year, two teams of scientists - one led by Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Centre and another led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin - said they had found that just a handful of mutations would allow H5N1 to spread like ordinary flu between mammals, and remain as deadly as it is now. This type of research is seen as vital for scientists working to develop vaccines, diagnostic tests and anti-viral drugs that could be deployed in the event of an H5N1 pandemic.
In December, the NSABB asked two leading scientific journals, Nature and Science, to withhold details of the research for fear it could be used by bioterrorists. They said a potentially deadlier form of bird flu poses one of the gravest known threats to the human population and justified the unprecedented call to censor the research.
WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said that because of these fears, “there must be a much fuller discussion of risk and benefits of research in this area and risks of virus itself”.
But a scientist close to the NSABB who spoke to Reuters immediately after the decision said the board was deeply “frustrated” by the situation. The only NSABB member attending the meeting was infectious disease expert Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University. The WHO said experts at the meeting included lead researchers of the two studies, scientific journals interested in publishing the research, funders of the research, countries who provided the viruses, bioethicists and directors from several WHO-linked laboratories specializing in influenza.
The H5N1 virus, first detected in Hong Kong in 1997, is entrenched among poultry in many countries, mainly in Asia, but so far remains in a form that is hard for humans to catch. It is known to have infected nearly 600 people worldwide since 2003, killing half of them, a far higher death rate than the H1N1 swine flu which caused a flu pandemic in 2009/2010.
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 — which it almost never does now — it could kill millions of people.
Dr. Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief of the journal Science, said it is now likely the paper submitted to Science and to the journal Nature will be published in full. Alberts said it is still not clear how the scientists in Geneva plan to handle biosafety issues mentioned by the group, and it is still not clear when the papers will be published, but it will likely not be years. “I hope this does not cause the world governments and WHO to stop working on this problem,” He suggests that for him and the editor of Nature, Dr Phil Campbell, to simply ignore the recommendations of the NSABB would undermine a system which could be considerably worse.
Alberts said of any potential fallout from the decision at a news briefing at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Vancouver. When asked how the journal is safeguarding copies of the as-yet-unpublished paper, he said it is in a locked electronic file and is password protected. And the magazine has asked reviewers of the paper to destroy their review copies.
“The 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,” Dr. Fauci said. “It was not unanimous, but a very strong consensus.”
Fouchier, who took part in the two-day meeting at the WHO which ended on Friday, said the consensus of experts and officials there was “that in the interest of public health, the full paper should be published” at some future date. “This was based on the high public health impact of this work and the need to share the details of the studies with a very big community in the interest of science, surveillance and public health on the whole,” he told reporters.
Asked about the potential bioterrorism risks of his and the US team's work, Fouchier said “it was the view of the entire group” at the meeting that the risks that this particular virus or flu viruses in general could be used as bioterrorism agents “would be very, very slim”. “The risks are not nil, but they are very, very small,” he said.
“It is our hope that that meeting will lead to an international resolution as to how to get the information selectively to those that need to know and that would allow us to adhere to the NSABB recommendation,” says Dr Alberts.
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