Here's your chance to
weigh in on mutant forms of bird flu that have been in the news — the U.S.
government wants to know just how scary you think these new viruses are.
The Department of Health
and Human Services posted a call for public comments today
requesting information on whether the lab-created bird flu viruses "have
the potential to pose a severe threat to public health and safety." The
government is also asking whether any special precautions need to be considered
when scientists work with these viruses.
The move comes after
some have criticized officials for not
having enough public discussion about these controversial viruses, which were
created in the lab as part of an effort to understand how highly pathogenic
H5N1 bird flu viruses out in the wild might mutate and start a pandemic in
people.
Because the
genetically-altered viruses are contagious between ferrets, the lab stand-in
for people, some critics fear that these viruses could cause a deadly pandemic
in humans if they ever escaped the lab. All work has been halted since January,
when researchers adopted a voluntary moratorium that was only supposed to last
60 days.
Since then, experts in
the scientific community have come to no consensus on whether research should
go forward and, if so, under what conditions.
Some microbiologists have
argued that the lab-modified viruses should only be studied at
labs with the very highest level of containment and security, so-called
"biosafety level 4" labs (BSL-4).
But others point out that limiting work to those
labs would slow down valuable research, because the world has so few BSL-4
labs. They say experiments can be safely done at a slightly lower level of bio-containment,
and that these studies are urgently needed to prepare for the threat of a
naturally-occurring flu pandemic.
Before the end of the
year, the government plans to hold an international workshop that will consider
the risks and benefits of experiments that make highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu
more contagious. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy
and Infectious Diseases, has urged that the scientists'
voluntary moratorium continue while discussions move forward.
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