The US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) has published a policy statement warning about the ‘unusually high magnitude’ risk from unrestricted publication of avian flu research. The NSABB statement was published online recently by the scientific journals Science and Nature, which will publish them in print later this month.
The NSABB is chaired by Dr. Paul Keim, Director of the Pathogen Genomics Division of the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), and a Regents Professor of Biology at Northern Arizona University, and Director of NAU's Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics.
The NSABB statement concerns recent, though as yet unpublished, research that showed how a strain of deadly avian flu virus could be made that is easily transmitted between mammals, including humans. Currently, the highly pathogenic A/H5N1 avian influenza virus — though a serious public health concern since its identification in Asia in 1997 — rarely infects people, because it is not easily transmitted among mammals.
The NSABB, which represents dozens of government and academic entities, was asked by the federal government to review the research prior to its publication because of its ‘dual use,’ meaning its potential for being used for good or bad purposes.
The NSABB weighed the benefits of the recent research, which could produce greater preparedness and potentially produce novel strategies leading to disease control, against the threat that details of the research could fall into the wrong hands.
It has stated concern that publishing the experiments in detail would provide information to someone or some organisation or government that would help them develop similar mammal-adapted influenza A/H5N1 viruses for harmful purposes. A pandemic or the deliberate release of a transmissible highly pathogenic influenza A/H5N1 virus would be an unimaginable catastrophe for which the world is currently inadequately prepared, it is feared.
The statement notes that science is in a revolutionary period of dramatically expanded technological capabilities, enabling the increased ability to manipulate the genetic material of microbes.
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