A panel of U.S. biosecurity experts is being asked to review its recommendation that two controversial bird flu studies shouldn't be published in full, a biosecurity conference was told Wednesday.
The group, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, will be given revised versions of the manuscripts of the studies, said the senior U.S. official who revealed the information.
One of the revised manuscripts in particular will clarify that an H5N1 virus made in a Dutch laboratory was not as lethal as has been suggested publicly to date, the meeting was told.
Ron Fouchier, the Dutch virologist who led one of the two research projects, told the conference the virus his lab created did spread easily among ferrets housed in adjacent cages.
But none of the ferrets infected that way died, Fouchier said. Only ferrets that were directly infected -- with high doses of virus dripped into their trachea -- were killed by the lab-made virus.
Those results have not been made public to date and actually contradict much of the information that has circulated about Fouchier's study since the NSABB recommended against its full publication last November.
Previously Fouchier has been quoted as saying all the ferrets in his study died after being infected by the mutant H5N1 virus. He was not immediately available Wednesday to explain how the misconception about his work arose.
The other study, led by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, reports on the creation of a different lab-made virus, a hybrid of H5N1 and human H1N1 viruses. Kawaoka has already revealed that the hybrid his lab produced spread easily among ferrets, but did not kill the animals.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the conference -- staged by the American Society of Microbiology -- that the NSABB will be reconvened to review the clarified data.
In an interview after the meeting, Fauci said he cannot prejudge what the group will decide, though he hopes a decision can be taken "within weeks."
The chair of the NSABB, virologist Paul Keim, told the meeting he cannot say what impact the revised information will have on the opinions of the advisory body.
The group, set up in the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, recommended last fall that the U.S. government ask two leading journals not to publish the full studies, saying they are recipes for making transmissible H5N1 viruses.
The journals and the researchers reluctantly agreed, but only on the proviso that a system be set up to share the withheld information with other scientists and public health officials who have a legitimate need to see it.
But that system still has not been devised. And a recent closed-door meeting on the controversy that was hosted by the World Health Organization concluded it could take years to develop such a system.
The WHO meeting, which was predominantly made up of influenza experts, concluded the studies should be published in full, but not immediately.
