The Dutch virologist accused of engineering a dangerous superflu a few years ago is back with more contentious research.
In 2011, Ron Fouchier and his team at Erasmus Medical Center took the H5N1 flu virus and made it more contagious. Now the team has published another study with more details on the exact genetic changes needed to do the trick.
The H5N1 bird flu is known to have sickened 650 people worldwide, and of those, 386 died. So far the virus hasn't been contagious in people.
But Fouchier's work, plus some similar research from another lab, showed for the first time that the virus had the potential to change in a way that would make it a real pandemic threat. Only a few mutations were necessary to make the H5N1 bird flu spread through the air between ferrets, the lab stand-in for people.
Critics argued that the scientists had created a dangerous new superflu. And they pushed for the recipe not to be openly published. They feared that others would repeat the work and either not adequately safeguard the virus or would deliberately release it.
After a long debate about security versus scientific openness, the research findings did finally appear in a journal.
Now, in the journal Cell, Fouchier and his colleagues expand on that initial work. They identified five mutations that are sufficient to make H5N1 spread through the air between ferrets.
"Two mutations enable improved binding of the H5N1 bird flu virus to cells in the upper respiratory tract of mammals," Fouchier told Shots in an email. "Another mutation increases the stability of the virus. The two remaining mutations enable the virus to replicate more efficiently."
0 Comments