It sounds like the setup for a Hollywood thriller: scientists in a lab create a virus as contagious as the flu that kills half of those infected. We're safe as long as the virus remains locked up, but if it escapes or gets into the hands of bioterrorists, it has the potential to become a pandemic and kill millions around the world.
But this isn't the latest summer blockbuster. According toNew Scientistmagazine, researchers in the Netherlands studying H5N1 -- commonly referred to as the bird flu or avian influenza -- havecreated a strain of the virus that's easily passed between mammals, and it's just as lethal as the original virus.
According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, theH5N1 virus has infected more than 500 peoplein more than a dozen countries and is known to kill around 60 percent of those that become infected.
But some in the scientific community are debating whether or not that's a good idea.
"It's just a bad idea for scientists to turn a lethal virus into a lethal and highly contagious virus. And it's a second bad idea for them to publish how they did it so others can copy it,"Dr. Thomas Inglesby, the director and CEO of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh,told NPR.
Others, likeMichael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), toldSciencemagazine that "These studies are very important."
The researchers "have the full support of the influenza community," Osterholm says, because there are potential benefits for public health. For instance, the results show that those downplaying the risks of an H5N1 pandemic should think again, he says.
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