Controversial Research Regarding the Bird Flu has Been Published in Nature

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-05-08

Summary:

“One of the controversial bird flu researches, done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been published online in the journal Nature on Wednesday. Interesting part of the news is that the research paper is on open access, so that everyone can read the paper without purchase. This research has been published with the approval of the U.S. Government after a months-long international debate about its value versus its use in bioterrorism as this paper has been referred by some people as the ‘recipe’ for a bioterrorism. In this research, headed by University of Wisconsin (UW)-Madison’s flu virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka, researchers have reported that four mutations in a bird flu virus cause the virus to spread among the ferrets in lab. So the research showed that how the H5N1 hybrid could be made and transmitted efficiently among mammals. The other paper headed by Ron Fouchier at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, is expected to be published in the journal Science in the very near future. This paper has many of the positive aspects as I have already commented on one of the Editorials of Nature, ‘To know’ is better in many cases than ‘Not to know’ and I think it is better to tell the world about the preparedness, so that the scientists around the world could work in defense.’ ‘There are people who say that bird flu has been around for 16, 17 years and never attained human transmissibility and never will,’ said Malik Peiris, virology professor at the University of Hong Kong. ‘What this paper shows is that it certainly can. That is an important public health message, we have to take H5N1 seriously. It doesn't mean it will become a pandemic, but it can,’ said Peiris, who wrote a commentary accompanying Kawaoka's paper in Nature. ‘By identifying mutations that facilitate transmission among mammals, those whose job it is to monitor viruses circulating in nature can look for these mutations so measures can be taken to effectively protect human health,’ Kawaoka said in a statement released Wednesday through the UW.”

Link:

http://technorati.com/lifestyle/article/controversial-research-regarding-the-bird-flu/

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.medicine oa.new oa.npg oa.comment oa.government oa.usa oa.netherlands oa.hybrid oa.pharma oa.biomedicine oa.u.wisconsin

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

05/08/2012, 10:40

Date published:

05/05/2012, 10:01