Health authorities put world at risk

This time it is not nuclear terrorism, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians as they go about their daily lives; this time it is not agent orange strafing screaming girls running away from cowards in the sky; this time it is not sodomy of detainees or torture of kidnap victims: it is sheer irresponsibility in handling Bird Flu.

This time it is not the United States government at the centre of the storm but rather, the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity which in its wisdom has given the go-ahead for the publication of all details into a special study sponsored by the US Government on Bird Flu, aka H5N1, a highly pathogenic form of the Influenza virus with an average mortality rate of 60 per cent, according to the World Health Organization. The WHO itself would also appear to deserve additional scrutiny.

Scientific madness

The scientific community discovers a highly pathogenic strain of Influenza, which has fortunately not yet managed to make the species jump between birds and humans. So what does it do? Why, the US authorities sponsor a special study in which scientists enabled the strain H5N1 to become airborne in a laboratory, providing it with the last piece of equipment it needs to go pandemic and kill sixty per cent of its victims. Ditto in the Netherlands. Two separate research teams* infected ferrets with the H5N1 virus which had been mutated to become more easily transmissible: changes introduced into the viral protein haemagglutinin facilitated airborne transmission.

Remember what the WHO did with H1N1 (Swine Flu)? Correct, absolutely nothing at all, except for sitting passively and observing it as it obediently climbed all the Pandemic Alert Phases to Phase 6, the highest. They did not restrict travel, they did not stop people or animals moving across borders, they did not make any attempt to stop the spread of the virus. So imagine what would happen in a H5N1 pandemic, where a third of the world's population was infected and sixty per cent of these died?

WHO: There have been 573 cases of H5N1 bird flu in humans in 15 countries since 2003; nearly 60 percent of those cases resulted in death.

Equally useless is the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, which last December deemed the research far too sensitive to be published due to the risk of bio-terrorists getting hold of the mutant strain but now, has changed its tune and has allowed the report on the research to be placed in the public domain. Originally, the same Board asked Nature and Science magazines not to publish details of the experiments.

One reason for this is that not all the laboratory ferrets infected with the airborne version of H5N1 died, as had originally been thought. Great, so the mortality rate is not one hundred per cent but so what? Even 60 per cent is unacceptably high. Once again the position of the WHO is suspect - the same body which sat back and adopted the position of an excited voyeur during H1N1 recommended the full publication of the reports on the haemagglutinin modifications in H5N1.

Why?

At a time when the globalization of knowledge and the extreme facility of transmission of data are a reality, at a time when terrorist networks are better and better equipped with technology and financing, does it make sense a) to create a monster superbug in the first place and b) to publish the details? Both of the research studies confirmed that it is easy to provide H5N1 with the ability to mutate and become a pandemic strain, infecting the global human population.

I don't think it makes any sense at all. But then again, I do not have shares or interests in the pharmaceutical companies which manufacture the vaccines.

* University of Wisconsin, USA led by Professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka and the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands led by Professor Ron Fouchier

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey