By January 27, 2012 I had done some more research on the new, genetically engineered Bird Flu virus, which I will make available on these added pages.

     I even found a photo on the Internet of Ron Fouchier in his lab. Ron Fouchier is the Dutch virologist, who working with money he received from an NIH (United States) grant, was able to cause 5 mutations in the Avian Flu virus that makes it easily transmissible between human beings, not just chickens and other birds.

Not Just engineered in Holland, but also in Wisconsin, USA

     As I continued to read further articles, I was soon made aware that Ron Fouchier in Holland was not the only one who had been able to make the H5N1 Flu virus a potential weapon to be used against billions of people.  Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin - Madison, working separately on the same project, was able to do so also, not using the same 5 mutations.

this is what H5N1 looks like in a cell culture

  

 and as I said before, we know what animals besides humans can spread it --- ferrets!

and we know that chickens were the first to pose a major threat to humans with this virus -- avian flu virus H5N1

       So long as chickens were the only major carrier of the disease it was possible to control at mostly by isolation, wearing masks, and killing a lot of chickens, but now the game may be changing completely, due to some totally ill-advised human meddling --

"This is how the world ends!"

       

 reads the sign along the back wall of this football-stadium sized flu clinic in the movie titled

      Perhaps the screen-writer, producer, and actors in this Hollywood movie knew that researchers were indeed working on such a virus.  Perhaps they did not.  That's unimportant.   What IS important is that the slightest mistake, or planned act by a terrorist or terrorist group, could, and probably will, unleash this new virus on an unprepared human race.

THIS IS REAL!  NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY!

       Over about two month's time, I've heard this discovery mentioned twice on the TV evening NEWS by Brian Williams, NBC news anchor.   Then I researched it on the Internet, finding it to be the "Hot Topic" on a number of blogs.   Then I picked up a Tabloid in the grocery store and found a whole page devoted to this subject, which I have reproduced in this series on this web site.  Then I picked up the February 2012 Popular Mechanics and found it featured as one of the 12 ways they have selected as ways the "world could end" in 2012!   

Page 48: "In the cruelest of ironies, the gravest threat to human life on earth may be other life on earth -- the microbial kind.  Let's turn our tour of all things apocalyptic to the Netherlands, where virologist Ron Fouchier at the Erasmus Medical center recently synthecised an airborne version of the H5N1 avian flu. The lethality and frequent mutations of H5N1 make it a serious pandemic threat.  The last big influenza pandemic, the Spanish flu of 1918, is estimated to have killed more than five times as many people as World War 1.  The possibility of a naturally occurring global outbreak

is ever present, but the threat from labs is becoming more frightening.  "The cost of synthesizing a new organism goes down every year," says Dr. Ali Khan, head of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  "A bad guy could make his own smallpox."

Page 49: Pandemic: For a Disease to be Globally Disruptive, it must undergo a flare-up of contagiousness and lethality -- like the 1918 influenza pandemic, which in the course of two and a half years killed 50 to 80 million people.  If the next influenza pandemic is as bad as 1918's, the equivalent toll would be 210 million.  "Knocking off that many people at once would disrupt civilization," the CDC's Khan says.   He adds, however, that in the past century medical science has developed powerful weapons against disease.  "We're an intelligent species," he says.  "We can fight back."

     "But what if that intelligence were turned against us?  Thanks to advances in biotechnology, it will become increasingly possible to custom-tailor a pathogen's lethality.  "We're on the cusp of what could be a very frightening time," says Charles P. Blair, director of the Terrorism Analysis Project at the Federation of American Scientists.  "I think in the very near future you're talking about a potential extinction event."                            --- Jeff Wise

     "In an unusual move, an international coalition of flu researchers agreed last week to a hiatus on work surrounding a highly contagious, mammal-adapted version of the avian influenza virus. Research on transmissible H5N1 flu will halt, and two manuscripts describing how to modify the virus won’t be published, at least not yet."

     "The voluntary pause came a few weeks after an American advisory panel recommended censoring the research in the name of security. So it raises an interesting question — is some research just too dangerous to pursue? Not just for the scientists conducting it, but for the public in a post-9/11 world?"

    "Voluntarily pausing science in the name of safety and public solace is certainly not common, but then neither is a potentially groundbreaking study into the mechanisms that could make bird flu more potent and more deadly. The decision, announced in Science and Nature, indicates influenza researchers want to quell public fears, but they also don’t want to censor their work."

     "Dr. Nancy Cox, chief of the Influenza Division at the Centers for Disease Control, said flu researchers will confer during the hiatus about how to proceed, including making modifications to security procedures or the biosafety requirements for labs doing this work. Flu is dangerous, but it’s not nearly as deadly as some of the other pathogens CDC studies, she noted."

     “If you think of Ebola and Marburg, and some other pathogens with a high lethality, which are worked on in the lab and for which there aren’t anti-virals and there aren’t vaccines, influenza falls into a little bit different category,” she said."

     "One of the two main labs at the center of this debate does not have a Biosafety Level 4 facility, the highest security level reserved for the most deadly pathogens. Issues like that will be a topic of discussion during the 60-day break."

      “(The hiatus) is unusual, but because there was so much concern about the work, it was an appropriate action on the part of the laboratories that are involved in this type of research,” Cox said."

      "It does have some precedent, however, in a 1975 conference in which scientists agreed to pause research on recombinant DNA. That meeting, known as the Asilomar Conference, was organized to quell public concern, but also to allow scientists to agree among themselves about how best to proceed.   At the time, recombinant DNA technology — the process of taking DNA from one organism, and recombining it with DNA from another — was still brand-new and researchers were still uncertain about the risks."

     "There are always concerns about misuse of the products of research,” said Jeffrey Kahn, deputy director of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. “Think about nanotechnology as another example, or genetically modified food. We like the benefits of these new technologies, but we always worry about he misuse, the misapplication, or the unintended consequences. The trick is, how do we oversee and prevent problematic outcomes, while still realizing the benefits of the technology?”

    "The flu moratorium stems from two separate studies prepared by scientists in the U.S. and the Netherlands (the latter having been funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health) investigating how the avian influenza virus could mutate and become transmissible among mammals, including us. The main paper is by virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, who engineered the genome of H5N1 to make a version that easily spreads among ferrets, the closest animal model of the human response to flu. After 10 virus generations, the mutated virus became airborne, infecting healthy ferrets who were housed near a sick one. The work was important because it disproves a previous assumption that avian flu could not easily adapt to mammals, requiring drastic changes to the virus’ genetic makeup that would render it unable to reproduce."

     "In a manuscript prepared last year, Fouchier describes his methods and processes, hoping to shed light on the ways in which the virus could mutate naturally. A separate paper by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Tokyo had similar results. The papers could help virologists look for vaccines or antiviral treatments. But some observers fear the work could create an extremely potent bioweapon, should the mutated virus escape from the lab — or should the work be replicated by someone with ill intentions. Interestingly, the moratorium letter  does not address the latter concern, focusing instead on lab procedures."

     “We would like to assure the public that these experiments have been conducted with appropriate regulatory oversight in secure containment facilities by highly trained and responsible personnel to minimize any risk of accidental release,” the letter reads."