Hybrid bird flu in Chinese laboratory

'Appalling irresponsibility': Scientists create bird flu virus that could kill millions

A RESEARCH laboratory in China has deliberately engineered a deadly new hybrid strain of the bird-flu virus and human influenza which could cause a global pandemic, outraging experts.

The Express,

3 May, 2013

Senior scientists have denounced the “appalling irresponsibility” of the researchers, warning there is a danger that the new viral strain could escape from the laboratory.

Lord May of Oxford, former president of the UK’s Royal Society, slammed the study – published today in the journal Science.

“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.

“The record of containment in labs like this is not reassuring.

"They are taking it upon themselves to create human-to-human transmission of very dangerous viruses. It’s appallingly irresponsible,” he said.

The controversial study into viral mixing was carried out by a team led by Professor Hualan Chen, director of China’s National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory at Harbin Veterinary Research Institute.

Professor Chen and her colleagues deliberately mixed the H5N1 bird-flu virus, which is highly lethal but not easily transmitted between people, with a 2009 strain of H1N1 flu virus, which is very infectious to humans.

H7N9, most commonly referred to as bird flu, has been making headlines around the world recently after China confirmed 126 cases which has so far killed 24 people.

That virus, however, has not yet been confirmed to be human-to-human transmissible, which would greatly increase the risk of a pandemic.

Professor Simon Wain-Hobson, an eminent virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, said it is very likely that some or all of the new hybrids could pass easily between humans and possess some or all of the highly lethal characteristics of H5N1 bird-flu.

“Nobody can extrapolate to humans except to conclude that the five viruses would probably transmit reasonable well between humans,” Professor Wain-Hobson said.

“We don’t know the pathogenicity [lethality] in man and hopefully we will never know. But if the case fatality rate was between 0.1 and 20 per cent, and a pandemic affected 500 million people, you could estimate anything between 500,000 and 100 million deaths,” he said.

“It’s a fabulous piece of virology by the Chinese group and it’s very impressive, but they haven’t been thinking clearly about what they are doing. It’s very worrying,” Professor Wain-Hobson said.