The top US biosecurity committee has called for global guidelines for research on dangerous flu strains. The move comes just weeks after the committee revised earlier advice about which details of two controversial flu studies could be published.
But information released this week shows that the committee was divided over the issue, strengthening the case for new guidelines. Meanwhile, a researcher involved in the Dutch study has obtained some new results with H5N1 bird flu that give the committee’s rhetoric added urgency.
H5N1 bird flu is lethal, but cannot usually spread between mammals by air. So work in 2011 by Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, showing airborne transmission caused a sensation.
Fouchier revealed that just five mutations were needed to make a wild H5N1 virus airborne and lethal for ferrets, which react to flu viruses in similar ways to humans.
No unanimous decision
In December, the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) advised against publishing details of the work. The board’s rationale was that if terrorists – or sloppy scientists – released such a virus, the effects could be devastating. Last month, however, the NSABB re-considered a revised version of the Fouchier paper at a closed meeting, and this time advised full publication.
It now seems that only 12 of 18 NSABB members voted for that U-turn. The 12 say that the revised paper does not “enable” misuse, because it did not “appear to result in H5N1 viruses that are both highly pathogenic and transmissible”. The revisions emphasise that ferrets that caught airborne virus in their noses did not die.
The six dissenters, however, say the work does enable misuse. They point out that the airborne viruses are “as pathogenic as the parental H5N1 strain”, a reference to their effects when placed in ferrets’ windpipes, which the researchers’ previous work suggests is the best way to assess possible effects in humans.
Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, one of the six dissenters, protested in a confidential letter – leaked to the journal Science – that the information presented at the NSABB meeting was biased towards publication. He says the NSABB did not fully analyse the risks and benefits of publishing, including the chances that “well-meaning scientists seeking to repeat the work might not have adequate biosafety measures”.
“While opposing the intentional misuse of biology is the focus of the NSABB, my concern with these experiments has been safety,” agrees David Franz, head of the NSABB’s international panel.
This week, however, the NSABB proposed talks to draft global guidelines for doing and communicating work involving dangerous pathogens. Experiments that change a pathogen’s transmission or host range “require detailed analyses of risks and benefits before they are conducted or communicated”, says the NSABB. It calls for international efforts to write guidelines, saying a “global engagement” working group of the NSABB will start this process soon.
This working group should also create some way to “redact” papers, says the board. “The US government and others are going to have to come up with a credible plan for limited distribution of information, when the next, last-minute review points to the need for this,” says David Relman of Stanford University in California, another of the six NSABB dissenters.
This might not be easy. Security rules in western countries that prohibit the “export” of sensitive information do not apply to basic research that is openly published. Once the Rotterdam group agreed to the December plan to publish its work in a redacted form, Dutch export rules came into play and have still not been lifted. The NSABB needed a special permit just to see the papers in March.
Dutch officials will consider lifting the ban next week. Even if they do lift it, Fouchier’s problems are not over. The NSABB says he should drop more recent data on mutations that he has put into the H5N1 paper since December, which would “enable the construction of an H5N1 that is both highly pathogenic and transmissible”.
It is not clear whether the work will have to await the guidelines and redaction mechanism that the NSABB is calling for before it can be published.
Some on the committee oppose publishing such work at all. “I do not favour publishing genetic blueprints for viruses that are highly pathogenic and then engineered for respiratory transmissibility they do not otherwise have,” says Relman, because this enables others to produce these viruses more easily. “This is a risk we should not take on behalf of the global public and the greater biosphere.”
More on these topics: