Bird flu research to be published in full

Two studies reporting what makes the H5N1 bird flu virus transmissible in mammals should be published fully, with no details left out, say flu experts meeting at the World Health Organisation in Geneva.

They say the benefits to public health outweigh the risks of bioterrorism, but they concede that publication should be delayed so scientists can "engage in public communication" aimed at preventing "unnecessary anxiety".

The decision to publish comes just a few short weeks after the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), the US's top biosecurity panel, asked these virologists not to publish the research in detail.

The NSABB worried that bioterrorists would use the information to make dangerous, transmissible H5N1 – or that other, less careful researchers would repeat the work and let the virus get away.

Why the difference? The researchers themselves have always wanted to publish without restriction, and of the 22 people who met in Geneva, fully half were leading flu researchers, and none of the rest were biosecurity experts concerned with bioterrorism.

Lightning rod

But it wasn't just a matter of researchers representing their own interests. Unlike the US panel, the Geneva group included public health experts from Indonesia and Vietnam, where people are dying of H5N1 and the virus is actively evolving. The chair of the censorship-favouring US panel, Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, was also part of this agreement, which the WHO describes as unanimous.

The issue has become a lightning rod for debate because the only thing standing between H5N1 bird flu, which infects birds in half a dozen countries in Asia and in Egypt, and a nasty pandemic is that the virus is hard for humans to catch. But we now know it can it become easily transmissible, in mammals anyway. Last year two labs created versions of the flu that transmits fine in ferrets, the best stand-ins for people.

Most worryingly, one of the labs, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, discovered that as few as five mutations made H5N1 as catchable as ordinary flu, while remaining as lethal as bird flu is now – and it kills around half the people who get it. This, says Keiji Fukuda, the WHO official who chaired today's meeting in Geneva, "changed our perception of the risk from H5N1".

Need-to-know basis

The two papers were submitted last year to the journals Nature and Science. US authorities – because the US National Agency for Allergy and Infectious Disease funded the work – sounded the alarm over fears that the Rotterdam work, especially, would provide a weapon to bioterrorists.

The NSABB met in Washington DC and in December asked that the work not be published in full, keeping the methods used to make the virus, and the mutations that made it nasty, under wraps.