U.S. call to suppress information about mutant man-made superflu is ‘censorship’

Vatic Note:  Why do we have to go overseas to get news about here in America? This is a very interesting site we stumbled on.  Lots of good stuff about depopulation and sterilization using Vaccines.   But on this one, I put it up because we just did a blog on the evil ones reallowing the research on the dangerous bird flu virus they are mutating intentionally.  

If I remember it correctly they combined it with the swine flu.  Now is that because of the likelihood that birds will play with pigs in their mud holes and so we so called need an antidote in case it mutates both into one virus from all that wrestling around those two animals might do????  I could see it being a concern if it were one of those animals was a dinosauer bird, but not a sparrow or chicken.  They just don't hang out with pigs enough to justify such concern.


U.S. call to suppress information about mutant man-made superflu is ‘censorship’
http://funvax.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/us-suppresses-information-about-man-made-bird-flu-h1n1/
by FunVax, January 26, 2013
Source: Agence France-Presse

Dimas Ardian/Getty Images
A scientist points to animal flesh inflected with the H5N1 virus

by Richard Ingham and Annie Hautefeuille

PARIS — Leading virologists warned of censorship after a U.S. bioterror watchdog asked scientific journals to withhold details of lab work that created a mutant strain of killer flu.

The controversy erupted on Tuesday when the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) urged the world’s two top journals to exclude key details before publishing the research papers.

In what is believed to be the first time it has made the recommendation, the government monitor cited an “extremely serious global health threat.”

As the U.S.-published Science and its counterpart in London, Nature, mulled the request, some experts said the NSABB request was an over-reaction.

Others said it could set a worrying precedent for the free flow of information — a vital component in scientific advance.

“It’s going to sully scientific communication if, for spurious concern about biological warfare, little groups of self-appointed people start censoring,” said John Oxford, a professor at London Queen Mary’s School of Medicine and Dentistry.

“I know they call it ‘redacted’ or some such, but it’s pure censorship,” he said in an interview with AFP.

“It’s censorship of a high level, and if that starts coming into the scientific arena, we will not know where we are.”

 Related

• U.S. urges science journals not to publish details of man-made pandemic-level bird-flu virus

In a blog, Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, said, “this is a bad day for virology, and for science in general.

“The decision by the NSABB sets a precedent for censoring future experimental results whose wide dissemination would benefit, not harm, humanity.”

Sparking the storm were a paper submitted to Science by a team led by Ron Fouchier at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, and another sent to Nature by virologists led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin and the University of Tokyo, which reportedly showed the same result.

Both teams of scientists created a man-made form of the H5N1 influenza virus in the goal of figuring out what makes the avian pathogen tick.

BIRD FLU HISTORY

Circulating among poultry, H5N1 leapt to humans in 1997, killing more than one in every two people that it infected.

Even though the virus was extremely lethal, it was not very contagious. It holed up in the bottom of the lungs rather than the upper airways, where viruses are spread by sneezing and coughing.

As a result, there have been only 573 documented cases of H5N1, although 336 have been fatal, according to the UN’s World Health Organisation (WHO).
The lab-made pathogen reportedly swept away the mainstream concept of H5N1’s lethality-versus-spreadability balance.

Tested on ferrets, it turned out to be both deadly and contagious. How much, though, has not emerged.

NSABB chair Paul Keim, a microbial geneticist, told the AAAS Science Insider report last month that he had huge concerns.

“I can’t think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one,” Keim was quoted as saying. “I don’t think anthrax is scary at all compared to this.”

DUTCH TEAM

In an interview with AFP on Wednesday, the Rotterdam team leader Fouchier said his paper had been redrafted in order to uphold the NSABB recommendations.

But, he argued, publishing the full findings could help save lives by giving insights into how the virus becomes airborne and spreads through human contact.

He denied that his work, carried out in an extremely secure Level Three biosafety lab, could be an off-the-shelf blueprint for terrorists.  (VN: The only terrorists on this planet right now are the dual citizens of a foreign nation that is also occupying our government and they are very famous for their terrorist acts.  Does the USS Liberty ring a bell?  How about 9-11?)

Several killer viruses and germs, including the bacteria for anthrax and the plague, have already been genetically sequenced and their data placed in the public domain.

“Recreating this virus is definitely not easy. You need highly-skilled people and a very large team, as well as specialised facilities to do this type of work,” Fouchier said.

Oxford said that, with billions of poultry around the world, there was a statistical probability that one day the same genetic alignment of H5N1 that was created artificially would crop up naturally.

“The biggest terrorist on this planet is Mother Nature. That’s what we have to worry about, not someone sitting in a cave in Afghanistan,” he said. (VN: or a Kabuz in Israel).

Jean-Claude Manuguerra of France’s Pasteur Institute said censorship or filtering of data was unlikely to work on practical grounds, given the informal networks that exist among scientists.

And it posed ethical dilemmas.

“Who is going to set down the procedures for publication?” he asked. “And who would have access to the complete data?”
_________________________________________
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.