Danger seen in plan to resurrect

[Guest guest]

http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/news/39554.php

 

Danger seen in plan to resurrect deadly '18 influenza virus

 

 

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

SEATTLE - University of Washington scientists plan to infect monkeys with a killer flu virus grown from cells exhumed from victims of the 1918 epidemic. They hope the insight they gain will unravel the mystery of why millions of people worldwide died from the virulent flu strain, and lead to development of better vaccines and drugs that may save lives in the future. "This was the most deadly infectious disease in the history of mankind, killing at least 40 million people," said Dr. Michael Katze, a UW microbiologist and principal investigator for the local arm of the project. "To this day, nobody understands why the virus was so deadly." Most experts believe another killer flu pandemic is overdue, Katze said, so it's critical to gain information about the disease. The UW received part of a $12.7 million grant, funded largely from Congress' $1.7 billion biodefense appropriation to the National Institutes of Health, to collaborate on the 1918 flu study with Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. Caution urged A skeptic of resurrecting and enlivening the 1918 flu virus, however, said it is critical to first make sure we are adequately protected against creating a "man-made" pandemic. "This project could create a new bug that infects someone in the lab who then walks out at the end of the day and, literally, kills tens of millions of people," said Ed Hammond, director of a biotechnology and bioweapons watchdog organization called the Sunshine Project, based in Austin, Texas. Although Hammond said he could accept the noble intentions of the UW scientists, he noted that there are no national laboratory standards for dealing with this particular virus. The lack of regulatory protection, he said, stems from the fact that influenza is generally regarded as a fairly routine disease. "But this organism, the 1918 virus, is something else," Hammond said. "It's very dangerous and easily spread." Protection called essential He contended that the 1918 virus deserves one of the highest levels of laboratory containment systems, known as Biosafety Level 3 Ag - so-called because the criteria were set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The only greater level of protection (in which lab workers don self-contained "moon suits" inside a pressurized, air-locked, multi-layered lab) is Biosafety Level 4. The first step in this project will be to spend about $300,000 of the grant to beef up the biosafety levels of protection at the Seattle facility, said Dr. William Morton, director of the regional primate research center at the UW. "We do need to have an elevated level of containment," Morton said. The lab facilities, which are primarily used today for HIV research involving primates, are built to Biosafety Level 2. But Morton said it's not clear that the 1918 flu study will require all the Biosafety Level 3 Ag protections. He said the current plan is to create an "enhanced" level 3 lab on one floor of the primate center, located in a non-descript research building in Belltown. Morton said the precise design for converting the lab would depend upon recommendations from the NIH.