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[The following is an excerpt.] Could it be blowing from farm to farm in the dirt? Could determined starlings and pigeons be carrying it into poultry houses on their feet? Is it spreading in feed, or being carried on truck tires? Federal agriculture officials are looking everywhere they can think of for H5N2 bird flu, which has spread to poultry flocks in 14 states and killed or forced the slaughter of more than 39 million birds. Highly pathogenic avian influenza has never spread like this before in the United States, and it's flummoxed the U.S. Department of Agriculture, farmers and...

A US government laboratory mistakenly mixed a common flu strain with a dangerous and deadly type of bird flu and shipped it to another lab, authorities said Friday. The latest news followed admissions of mishandled anthrax and forgotten smallpox vials at separate US government labs, and raised new concerns about the safety of dangerous agents which could be used as bioterror weapons. No one was endangered by the mixed flu strain, said Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden, who nevertheless said he was "astonished" that protocols could have been violated in that way. "Everything we have looked...

Flu scientists are hoping to vaccinate themselves against another outbreak of a crippling controversy. In a letter published this week by Nature and Science (see p. 612), 22 researchers make their case for launching potentially risky experiments with the H7N9 avian influenza virus, which emerged earlier this year in China and which some scientists fear could spark a deadly human pandemic. The scientists, who mostly work in U.S.-funded labs, also detail the safety and security precautions that they would take to prevent the possibly dangerous viruses they create from escaping from the lab—or falling into the hands of terrorists. In...

Enlarge Image Power tool. An antibody called F16, seen here attached to an influenza virus protein, protected animals against a range of flu viruses. Credit: D. Corti and A. Lanzavecchia, Annu. Rev. Immunol. 31 (2013) In 2009, a global collaboration of scientists, public health agencies, and companies raced to make a vaccine against a pandemic influenza virus, but most of it wasn't ready until the pandemic had peaked. Now, researchers have come up with an alternative, faster strategy for when a pandemic influenza virus surfaces: Just squirt genes for the protective antibodies into people's noses. The method—which borrows ideas...

Senior scientists have criticised the “appalling irresponsibility” of researchers in China who have deliberately created new strains of influenza virus in a veterinary laboratory. They warned there is a danger that the new viral strains created by mixing bird-flu virus with human influenza could escape from the laboratory to cause a global pandemic killing millions of people. Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist and past president of the Royal Society, denounced the study published today in the journal Science as doing nothing to further the understanding and prevention of flu pandemics. “They claim they are doing this...

An international group of scientists this week ended a year-long moratorium on controversial work to engineer potentially deadly strains of the H5N1 avian flu virus in the lab. Researchers agreed to temporarily halt the work in January 2012, after a fierce row erupted over whether it was safe to publish two papers reporting that the introduction of a handful of mutations enabled the H5N1 virus to spread efficiently between ferrets, a model of flu in mammals (see Nature http://doi.org/fxv55r; 2012). Both papers were eventually published, one in Nature1 and one in Science2. Now, in a letter simultaneously published on 23...

Enlarge Image Risky science. The U.S. government is proposing special reviews for experiments that might increase the risk posed by the H5N1 avian influenza virus (brown). Credit: Wikimedia Researchers are giving mixed reviews to a draft U.S. government plan to subject some grant requests for studies involving the H5N1 avian influenza virus to special reviews—and perhaps even require the work to be kept secret. Elements of the plan have been "very controversial within [the] U.S. government" committee that developed it, Amy Patterson, associate director for science policy at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, told a...

(WASHINGTON) -- A vaccine for the H5N1 avian flu, or bird flu, has been approved by a panel of experts to be stockpiled for emergency use in case of a pandemic. A U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel voted 14-0 in favor that the vaccine, manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in Quebec, was in compliance with licensing standards under accelerated approval regulations, reports MedPage Today. H5N1 currently does not spread as easily among humans as it does among domestic foul, but flu experts have feared it could mutate and potentially lead to a pandemic. In infected humans, the virus is...

Enlarge Image Hot spots. Three mutations in or near hemagglutinin's binding site (yellow) and one on its stalk increased transmissibility. Credit: H.-L. Yen and J. S. M. Peiros, Nature, Adavanced Online Edition, (2012) One of two influenza papers at the center of an intense, 6-month international debate has finally seen the light of day. Today, Nature published a controversial study in ferrets that shows how scientists can engineer an avian influenza strain to transmit between mammals through respiratory droplets such as those created by coughing or sneezing. The 11-page study, led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin,...

Chinese bicycle past a few chickens feeding on on a city farm in Beijing April 22, 2009. (UPI Photo/Stephen Shaver)  BEIJING, April 18 (UPI) -- An outbreak of bird flu was reported in northwestern China, resulting in the slaughter of 95,000 chickens, the Ministry of Agriculture said Wednesday. The epidemic H5N1 bird flu virus was discovered Friday at several farms in the village of Touying in Ningxia Hui autonomous region, Xinhua reported. More than 23,000 chickens showed symptoms of bird flu on Friday, which was then confirmed by the National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory as H5N1 bird flu after...

(Reuters) - When 22 bird flu experts meet at the World Health Organization this week, they will be tasked with deciding just how far scientists should go in creating lethal mutant viruses in the name of research. The hurriedly assembled meeting is designed to try to settle an unprecedented row over a call to ban publication of two scientific studies which detail how to mutate H5N1 bird flu viruses into a form that could cause a deadly human pandemic. But experts say whatever the outcome, no amount of censorship, global regulation or shutting down of research projects could stop rogue...

The best defense against a deadly attack with avian flu is the open scientific enterprise. Today the U.S. National Scientific Advisory Board for Biosecurity recommended that the journals Nature and Science restrict publication about controversial new research relevant to the transmission of avian flu between humans. The fear: Would-be bioterrorists are combing the pages of the journals for tips on how to wreak havoc. The H5N1 avian flu virus has killed 60 percent of the 600 or so people known to have come down with it since it was first identified in 1997. For comparison, seasonal flu in the United...

The Pandemic Flu Information Forum posted a machine translation of the Indonesian article, excerpt below: Indonesia Health Minister Suspected Bird Flu Immune Drug JAKARTA - MICOM: Health Minister Endang Rahayu Sedyaningsih suspect in Indonesia has occurred the possibility of resistance (drug resistance) to the drug oseltamivir. The hypothesis was made based on the presence of some positive victims of bird flu in Indonesia are still died despite oseltamivir have been given early. < snip > If there is resistance to oseltamivir, Indonesia no longer has a drug to counteract the spread of the H5N1 virus. Because, oseltamivir is the only...

For the first time ever, a government advisory board is asking scientific journals not to publish details of certain biomedical experiments, for fear that the information could be used by terrorists to create deadly viruses and touch off epidemics. In the experiments, conducted in the United States and the Netherlands, scientists created a highly transmissible form of a deadly flu virus that does not normally spread from person to person. It was an ominous step, because easy transmission can lead the virus to spread all over the world. The work was done in ferrets, which are considered a good model...

A group of scientists is pushing to publish research about how they created a man-made flu virus that could potentially wipe out civilisation. The deadly virus is a genetically tweaked version of the H5N1 bird flu strain, but is far more infectious and could pass easily between millions of people at a time. The research has caused a storm of controversy and divided scientists, with some saying it should never have been carried out.

Expert unease over deadly flu virus 'created' in Dutch laboratory Friday 25 November 2011 Dutch scientists have created a flu virus which is so deadly there is doubt about whether the research should be published, the Volkskrant reports on Friday. The paper says American experts are worried detailed information could fall into the wrong hands and that terrorists could recreate the virus as a weapon. The fears are notable because the work was carried out on behalf of the National Institutes of Health in the US. The research team, led by Ron Fouchier, professor of virology at Erasmus teaching hospital,...

Ladies and Gentlemen, the next Black Death, a global pandemic of catastrophic proportions, has reared its ugly head in the Far East, home to many pandemic viruses. This time it is not a 30 per cent death rate, it is an 85 per cent death rate. It is called the Cambodian Avian Flu virus. Avian Flu has been around for centuries. So have other pandemics. But an 85 per cent mortality rate? Let us not invent, let us use the World Health Organization's communications: Avian influenza - situation in Cambodia 9 February 2011 - The Ministry of Health of Cambodia...

A new study authored by UW-Madison virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka warns there is the potential for avian H5N1 influenza and human seasonal flu viruses to interact and form a new flu strain which could be both highly contagious and deadly. Since the H5N1 influenza outbreak in Asian poultry in 2003, forms of this virus have spread to wild birds and poultry on several continents. However, since the H5N1 virus lacks the ability to transmit efficiently among humans, there have been only 442 confirmed human cases -- although 59 percent (262) of those infected have died. The new findings -- which appear...

MADISON — The specter of a drug-resistant form of the deadly H5N1 avian influenza is a nightmare to keep public health officials awake at night. Now, however, a study published this week (Dec. 21) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests that a new compound, one on the threshold of final testing in humans, may be more potent and safer for treating "bird flu" than the antiviral drug best known by the trade name Tamiflu. Known as T-705, the compound even works several days after infection, according to Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a University of Wisconsin-Madison virologist and...

'The obvious risk is of H5N1 combining with the pandemic [H1N1] virus' Virologists and influenza authorities are becoming increasingly concerned that the 2009 A-H1N1 flu virus could “reassort” with the highly virulent H5N1 avian flu that’s still prevalent in parts of the world like China, and that a mutation could occur resulting in a new strain that has the lethality of H5N1 and the human transmissibility of A-H1N1. The concerns have grown in the wake of revelations that mutations of the H1N1 flu virus had been found in Norway and elsewhere, leading experts to fear that it might just be...