Deadly H5N1 Flu Studies To Stay Secret... For Now

Edsj writes "A spokesman for the World Health Organization announced that an agreement had been reached, after a debate, to keep details secret of the controversial work about the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian flu virus until deeper risk analyses have been carried out. The scientists who made the study, led by Ron Fouchier, still want to release the full paper at some future date for public viewing, but for the time being, the NSABB got what it wanted." The moratorium will be extended "probably for several months."

Comments

Wikipedia says

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H5N1

On October 10, 2011 the WHO announced a total of 566 human cases which resulted in the deaths of 332 people since 2003

So it kills about 58% of the people it infects

Re:Wikipedia says

[Hadlock]

So which weapon has a higher long term mortality rate to the innocent? Land mines or biological warfare? Iran's research in nuclear weapons seems so passe at this point. As we approach 10 billion people on this blue marble, the chances that we'll cull our numbers by 20% or more using some novel new method seems to race towards 1 at a faster and faster rate.

Re:Wikipedia says

[Mr.LightFoot]

If you read the paper or summary of the paper, it is talking about mutation and implicit manipulation of the virus to 'weaponize' the flu. The steps to mutate the virus was extremely simplistic and can be spread quickly around the globe. An example of how it would work would be similar to the movie Contagion. If you were in Asia during SARS or Africa during Ebola, you would see how fast society/community collapsed. Panic ensures, rich ppl got cures/protection while poor got guns. By delaying the publication, WHO can allow some scientists to develop vaccines to immunize or have counter agents available for key gov't officials to ensure continuance of governance. (aka, politically connected/rich) can get their protection and the rest of us dies until the vaccine is spread across teh world and H1N1is eradicated or diminished. BTW, if you look at the Stats, the reason it didn't spread wide, it happened in China and other Asian countries that has an authoritarian government. Civil unrest results in a bullet to the head or heart. In "free world" it's all man/woman/child for themselves, and therefore, stats would have been higher.

Re:Wikipedia says

[LordLimecat]

Last I checked, there ISNT an "antidote" to the flu.

Re:Wikipedia says

[PCM2]

My amateur understanding of it is that the particularly deadly strains burn themselves out fairly quick, because a dead person doesn't spread disease like an ambulatory one. Because we have a much better understanding of these things today(transmission, sanitation, incubation, etc), a pandemic in a modern society will be more difficult for a virus to attain and easier to avoid the scorch the earth policy necessary to eradicate it. Granted, small deadly outbreaks can't be stopped, but it would be less likely for it to spread like we've seen before before it burns itself out.

I don't know. Most Americans I've met have serious qualms about calling in sick to work for a cold or flu -- whether it's because they don't want to be perceived as whiners, or they have too much work on their plate, or they get so little vacation that they don't want to lose days that they could otherwise use for much-needed rest. A flu virus could very easily become a pandemic even if it makes you sicken and die in a single day, so long as it makes you walk around with a cough and the sniffles for a few days before that.

Also, in general the idea that diseases evolve to be less virulent over time is a myth. Think about rabies; if you catch full blown rabies (you don't get your shots in time), you're going to die. Mortality for rabies in humans approaches 100 percent. Once you develop symptoms, you'll be dead in a week. So is rabies "pricing itself out of the market"? No. It has existed for all of human history. You don't hear about cases of rabies in major human cities very often, but outside the developed areas, when a human or an animal gets rabies, it's the same rabies it has always been, and it's fatal. And there are many other diseases that have very dire, potentially lethal symptoms in humans. The idea that a living human must keep passing a pathogen to other living humans for it to survive in the long run is, unfortunately, too naïve and simplistic a model of disease.

Re:Wikipedia says

[PCM2]

Nope. It kills 58% of people who are detected to have been infected. There might be hundreds more people who get better quickly and never seek medical attention.

Why is that relevant?

People who don't sicken don't need medical attention. I think that's obvious.

Of those people who sicken from the flu, the ones who are infected with H5N1 die much more often than the people who sicken from other strains.

Suppose they came out with statistics showing that most people who have handguns fired at them don't get hit by the bullet, and of those that do get hit by the bullet, not many die. However, of those people who do get hit by the bullet, hollow-tip bullets cause much more severe injuries than regular ones. Would your conclusion be, "Who cares, I'm Superman"?

Reworded Title

[CanHasDIY]

Government Organization Declares Self Sole Proprietor of Bio-Terrorism

And as we all know, government officials never use such exclusivity of information for their own personal profit.

Nothing to worry about here, Citizen, now move along...

Cat is out of bag anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

As was brought up couple weeks back in SciFri, the study abstract and rough process which has been talked publicly is enough for skilled laboratory to try same. Passing the virus just trough five ferret infections to get it spreading over air is so simple and little that it might happen anyway naturally over time without human intervention.

All we can do and should do is start developing vaccines now and not wait until we would be too late. It takes about 6 months to develop and produce enough vaccine. Thinking that the lethality of H1N5 is about 50% compared to smallpox ~40% it's going to be enormous panic to get it done if any preparations were not done beforehand.

The fact that this is kept secret only means...

[gatkinso]

... that it is relatively easy to produce this deadly strain.

If it were hard, say like producing an atomic bomb (rather, producing the fuel for an atomic bomb)... then there would be no reason to keep it secret.

Yet again the editors deleted my submission

[wisebabo]

I submitted this a few hours before this one. (That makes three for three recent submissions of mine that were in the /recent queue and just vanished!). I guess for this one they didn't like my alarmist tone. Anyway, these guys say the studies will stay secret but the New York Times link I provided says they will be releasing the full details (after a delay).

Here is my submission:

wisebabo writes
"So they're going to release FULL details of how to make this? Time to whip up my bio-reactor!

Ok, so this easily transmissible human to human virus (as predicted by ferret models) *only* has a lethality of 50% but that should be enough to collapse civilization. At least it'll help cut down on global warming.

Still that doesn't compare with that (smallpox?) variant which had an almost 100% fatality rate. I remember the publication for that one was suppressed pretty fast. I guess they think this one isn't nearly as dangerous which i would agree with except for the fact that it is AIRBORNE TRANSMISSIBLE (it's based on the Flu!). Boy is sneezing going to be a real conversation killer!

Seems like we've solved the Fermi Paradox; once a species has figured out to make or modify self-replicating nano bots (like viruses), they'll inevitably make one that will in one way or another wipe them out.

Hey, let's see if we can get them to release this in time for 12/21/12!"

Link to Original Source

Re:Security through obscurity? Again?

[timeOday]

All security is through obscurity. If somebody knows your key, or your hiding spot, or what time you have to put down your shotgun to take a crap, you're through. All cryptography does is let you protect a large secret with a smaller one.

Re:They certainly managed to draw attention to it

[Luckyo]

Or perhaps they were looking for ways to prevent the global pandemic that has a pretty good potential of wiping out over half of humans on the planet? You know, like those who experimented on dozens of diseases that killed most people before they reached the age where they could procreate, eventually driving infectious disease mortality so far down, that most people don't understand the risks hiding in them?

Just a suggestion.

Re:Security through obscurity? Again?

[ColdWetDog]

Well in the case of biology, pretty much.

You'd have to have some pretty damn good resources in order to be able to build H5N1, not only that, to be able to make the even worse version they supposedly created.

Since these guys likely had top gear to produce these results, it'd likely take a lot of trial and error for those with almost certainly lesser resources. (at least, we should hope they had top hardware for doing this research...)

When (if) we find out ways to protect against those strains in particular, it'd be less of a risk.

Not as much as you might think. As I pointed out previously, the Ferret is out of the bag. The big question was whether or not you could take H5N1 and pass it through a mammal and make mammal-mammal transmission reasonably efficient (as far as the virus is concerned). Since we know the answer is 'yes' and the bonus answer is 'ferret' then the techniques needed to reproduce (so to speak) the experiment is 1) a culture of H5N1 and the ability to keep it alive and 2) a cage full of ferrets and the ability to keep them alive. 1) isn't exactly trivial but it's not anything that a PhD level viral researcher couldn't manage on a budget easily obtainable by some random psychopath. 2) is trivial.

We're doomed (again).

Re:I doubt it would take that long

[PCM2]

I'd guess that a lot of that "6 months" involves testing. In other words, if there is a very quickly spreading pandemic that kills over half the people it infects, we could probably say "Let's just pray that there aren't too horrible side effects for most people. Start mass producing the prototype!"

Heh. But you're talking about vaccinating just about everybody on the planet, in a pandemic. Is your proposal that we inject the entire population of the world with an untested medicine, in hopes of preventing disease? I somehow don't think that suggestion would travel far within the WHO.

Also, there's no "prototype vaccine." They know how to make a vaccine that will be effective against any strain of flu, pretty much. They're all just variations of the same thing. The problem is that there are so many different variations (mutations) that they have to predict which one to manufacture in any given year, given the production capacity (labs/factories) available. And you can't just say "keep manufacturing H5N1 vaccine until we have enough for everybody," because it doesn't necessarily have a long shelf life. In fact, they're not really sure how long stockpiled doses would remain effective.

What's more, manufacturing the flu vaccine isn't like manufacturing paint or chairs. The raw materials of the flu vaccine involve living, biological things. The virus itself is alive and must be cultured (before they kill it), and to do that, they grow it inside fertilized chicken eggs -- and as we know, nine chickens don't help you produce a fertilized egg any faster than one does (and to get more chickens, you need more fertilized eggs). So when you estimate how many doses of flu vaccine can be manufactured in a given period of time, it's a little bit like estimating how many cheeseburgers McDonald's can make in the same period of time ... while it is possible to "just make more," it's not necessarily as easy as it sounds.

tl;dr -- When scientists talk about how many flu vaccine doses it would be possible to manufacture in a given period, they pretty much know what they're talking about.

58% figure is bogus

[estitabarnak]

The 58% figure is not the number of people who were exposed to the virus and died. It is not the number of people who have been exposed and successfully infected and died.

The 58% figure is the number of people who were SO sick that it warranted going to the hospital, and then died.

Serological surveys have shown that in the populations where H5N1 has been historically present there are an extensive number of people who have been infected, successfully mounted an immune response, and survived. And even that says nothing about the people who were exposed and did not get sick.

The 50-60% figure has been getting a ton of coverage in the press, and is total bullshit. As a reason to censor scientific research, it is total bullshit.