Saturday, December 31, 2011

WHO: Bird flu research raises safety questions

WHO: Bird flu research raises safety questions

GENEVA (AP) â€" The World Health Organization is warning that dangerous systematic information could tumble into a wrong hands after U.S. government-funded researchers engineered a form of a lethal H5N1 bird influenza virus some-more simply endemic between humans.

In a strongly worded matter Friday, WHO pronounced it was "deeply endangered about a intensity disastrous consequences" if a formula of a investigate were used to emanate biological weapons or a deteriorated pathogen was incidentally released.

"This is not a kind of research that we would wish to have out there," WHO's tip influenza expert, Dr. Keiji Fukuda, told The Associated Press in a write interview.

At a same time, WHO was endangered that all convincing researchers should be means to entrance a investigate to improved know how to forestall a lethal H5N1 pandemic, Fukuda said.

H5N1 frequency infects humans and customarily usually those who come into tighten hit with poultry. But among those infected, adult to 60 percent die, and scientists are closely examination a pathogen for any signs it is apropos some-more simply endemic from tellurian to human.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health final week asked scientists during Erasmus University Medical Center in a Netherlands and a University of Wisconsin-Madison to refrain from edition full sum of their work on how to make a H5N1 virus some-more simply endemic between humans.

The rare step by NIH stirred regard in a systematic village that researchers with a legitimate need to know about these dangerous mutations, quite in Asia, would be prevented from accessing a data.

Fukuda pronounced there was a risk that viewed censorship of systematic formula could mistreat a supposed Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework, an general agreement painstakingly beaten out usually recently by a tellurian body's 194 member states.

"We don't wish a concerns or controversies surrounding this H5N1 investigate to poise a risk to a doing of that horizon since we see it as a really critical open health step," Fukuda told The Associated Press.

"But during a same time we commend that a investigate raises questions about what are suitable safeguards, what kind of procedures should be in place, what are a right mechanisms for shortening any risk," he said.

Fukuda pronounced WHO itself had had not performed a formula of a dual groups' investigate yet, and competence not even ask for it.

"I'm anticipating that we are arcane to as most of a sum as possible, though like anybody else one of a questions for us is what kind of information do we need to know," he said.


News referensi http://news.yahoo.com/bird-flu-research-raises-safety-questions-154550395.html