'Appalling irresponsibility': Senior scientists attack Chinese researchers for creating new strains of influenza virus in veterinary laboratory

[tetano]

Senior scientists have criticised the ?appalling irresponsibility? of researchers in China who have deliberately created new strains of influenza virus in a veterinary laboratory.

They warned there is a danger that the new viral strains created by mixing bird-flu virus with human influenza could escape from the laboratory to cause a global pandemic killing millions of people.

Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist and past president of the Royal Society, denounced the study published today in the journal Science as doing nothing to further the understanding and prevention of flu pandemics.

?They claim they are doing this to help develop vaccines and such like. In fact the real reason is that they are driven by blind ambition with no common sense whatsoever,? Lord May told The Independent.

...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/appalling-irresponsibility-senior-scientists-attack-chinese-researchers-for-creating-new-strains-of-influenza-virus-in-veterinary-laboratory-8601658.html

[tetano]

Re: 'Appalling irresponsibility': Senior scientists attack Chinese researchers for creating new strains of influenza virus in veterinary laboratory

The original article

[tetano]

Re: 'Appalling irresponsibility': Senior scientists attack Chinese researchers for creating new strains of influenza virus in veterinary laboratory

Nature | News
Scientists create hybrid flu that can go airborne

H5N1 virus with genes from H1N1 can spread through the air between mammals.

Ed Yong

02 May 2013
Expand

Researchers have crossed two strains of avian flu virus to create one that can be transmitted through the air ? and possibly settle on the cilia of lung cells as in this conceptual image.



As the world is transfixed by a new H7N9 bird flu virus spreading through China, a study reminds us that a different avian influenza ? H5N1 ? still poses a pandemic threat.

A team of scientists in China has created hybrid viruses by mixing genes from H5N1 and the H1N1 strain behind the 2009 swine flu pandemic, and showed that some of the hybrids can spread through the air between guinea pigs. The results are published in Science1.

Flu hybrids can arise naturally when two viral strains infect the same cell and exchange genes. This process, known as reassortment, produced the strains responsible for at least three past flu pandemics, including the one in 2009.

There is no evidence that H5N1 and H1N1 have reassorted naturally yet, but they have many opportunities to do so. The viruses overlap both in their geographical range and in the species they infect, and although H5N1 tends mostly to swap genes in its own lineage, the pandemic H1N1 strain seems to be particularly prone to reassortment.


?If these mammalian-transmissible H5N1 viruses are generated in nature, a pandemic will be highly likely,? says Hualan Chen, a virologist at the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who led the study.

..

http://www.nature.com/news/scientists-create-hybrid-flu-that-can-go-airborne-1.12925