NEWS - No flu's good flu?

I had very mixed feelings about a study that suggests the H5N1 bird flu virus won't mutate easily into a virus that could cause a pandemic. If the research is correct, then this virus--which has killed nearly 60% of those who have been infected by it--won't easily evolve into a form that can spread readily from person to person. That is certainly good news.

What troubles me is how the scientists learned this--government scientists tried to create a more contagious version of the virus.

I'll grant that the scientists would have taken great care to insure that the virus didn't escape--if only for their own safety. That said, I still have a very hard time seeing how the benefits could outweigh the risks. The hybrid virus they created doesn't exist in the wild--meaning that anything learned from it may not necessarily apply to a naturally-evolved bird flu pandemic strain. Indeed, scientists were very careful to mention that fact; CDC director Julie Gerberding, quoted in the Bloomberg news account, said herself, "This does not mean that H5N1 can't develop into a pandemic strain. We are far from out of the woods on H5N1 on a global scale.''

While the benefits seem negligible, the risk is obvious: if they had succeeded in creating a contagious hybrid, then, in the unlikely event that such a virus had escaped, it could have killed millions! Further, since they would have needed some way to get into the lab--if nothing else, to put the ferrets they experimented on into the lab--I have to believe it would have to have been possible for the virus to escape. Researchers, of course, must work with exceedingly dangerous germs to understand them--but they weren't working with a dangerous natural virus here, they were creating a potentially dangerous artificial one. Certainly, scientific research can be arcane and the benefits of a line of research may not be immediately obvious to the layman, but, based solely on what I read in the two accounts, what the CDC scientists did strikes me as foolhardy and possibly immoral. I don't believe they took the sort of risks one takes when building a nuclear power plant or creating genetically modifying crops--both of which have very real, great, and demonstrable benefits. I think the CDC scientists took a risk more along the lines of drunk driving or randomly shooting a gun on a city street.

I'm not sure which scares me more--that scientists could be behaving so apparently recklessly, or that nobody else (such as Congress before the CDC gets next year's funding or the media who so calmly reported the story in the first place) seems to be asking questions about this.