NIH has just approved two projects that aim to turn avian influenza into a potentially deadly human pathogen. The research was 'paused' by the US in 2014, but the pause was quietly lifted last year, despite the warnings of hundreds of distinguished scientists from around the world.
Not surprisingly, then, when other scientists learned about the efforts to turn bird flu into a human flu, we asked: why the heck would anyone do that? The answers were and still are unsatisfactory: claims such as"we'll learn more about the pandemic potential of the flu" and"we'll be better prepared for an avian flu pandemic if one occurs.
One of the deadliest strains of avian flu circulating today is H5N1. This strain has occasionally jumped from birds to humans, with a mortality rate approaching 50%, far more deadly than any human flu. Fortunately, the virus has never gained the ability to be transmitted directly between humans. That is, it didn't have this ability until two scientists, Ron Fouchier in the Netherlands and Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin, engineered it to gain this ability.
Well, Fouchier and Kawaoka are back at it again. NIH actually lifted the"pause" in December 2017, and invited scientists to submit proposal for this type of research.that all he had to do was"find and replace" a few terms in his previous proposal and it would likely sail through peer review. It appears he was correct, although according to thearticle, his study has been approved but not yet actually funded.
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