U.S. virologists intentionally engineer super-deadly pandemic flu virus

U.S. virologists intentionally engineer super-deadly pandemic flu virus


(NaturalNews) Two American researchers whose efforts to deliberately
re-engineer the H5N1 avian flu virus to be more virulent and deadly to
humans are now asking that a government-advised moratorium on their
controversial research be lifted. According to TIME, the duo
alleges that precise details about how it developed the deadly flu
strain must be made public, and that its controversial research be
allowed to continue for the sake of "public health."

As we reported back in early 2012, Ron Fouchier from the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands and Yoshihiro Kawaoka from the University of Wisconsin
intentionally developed a militarized strain of H5N1 avian flu capable
of easily transmitting among mammals. Natural strains of H5N1, on the
other hand, primarily transmit between birds and other fowl only, which
means this type of flu is not that significant of a threat to humans.

But for the alleged purpose of learning how H5N1 might
mutate at some point in the future to become more of a threat to
humans, Fouchier and Kawaoka deliberately induced these mutations in
test ferrets with complete success. In the process, they essentially
discovered a way to potentially spark a global flu pandemic with the
potential to kill or seriously injure billions of people. And following
their insane discovery, they actually tried to publish the recipe for
this deadly strain in public journals.

Concerned about the possibility that this critical information might be misused, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity
(NSABB), a federal advisory committee that oversees research of this
nature, urged the two scientists not to publish their findings in the
journals Nature and Science. And while they agreed to this recommendation initially, Fouchier and Kawaoka are now pushing to continue on with their work.

"Because H5N1 virus transmission studies are essential for pandemic
preparedness and understanding the adaptation of influenza viruses to
mammals, researchers who have approval from their governments and
institutions to conduct this research safely, under appropriate
biosafety and biosecurity conditions, have a public-health
responsibility to resume this important work," allege the original
researchers about their work.


Only about 350 people worldwide have ever died from H5N1

Based
on the wording of this petition, you would think that H5N1 is
responsible for killing at least tens of thousands of people every year,
and that we must take action now to stop its spread. But in reality, H5N1 has only infected about 600 people ever
since it was first discovered in Hong Kong back in 1997. And among
these 600, only about 350 ended up dying, which means roughly 24 people a
year, on average, die from H5N1 infection.

Contrast this with the roughly 5,000
Americans who die every year from food poisoning, for instance, and it
becomes abundantly clear that H5N1 is hardly the serious public health
threat that Fouchier, Kawaoka, and others continually claim it is. The
average person is more likely to die from choking on a piece of lettuce
than he or she is of ever contracting H5N1 influenza, let alone dying
from it. So why all the focus on deliberately inducing H5N1 to spread
among humans and cause a real pandemic?

The real answer to this
question is shrouded in mystery. If you believe the official
explanation, researchers merely want to anticipate how H5N1 might
mutate in the future in order to get a handle early on how to address
it. It is a purely hypothetical scenario that may not ever come to pass,
of course, but it is the purported reason and justification for such
research, even though such research could end up being the cause of a deadly H5N1 outbreak in the very near future.

And
this brings us to the second and more sinister explanation. Researchers
could be deliberately engineering a super-deadly form of H5N1 for the
unstated purpose of eventually releasing it into the wild in order to
trigger a pandemic. This is not that far-fetched when considering that
the researchers involved in this work are carefully studying how many
times the already-mutated virus needs to spread between mammals on its
own in order to naturally mutate again into an even more deadly virus.

"The case fatality rate of wild H5N1 in the WHO (World Health Organization) database is nearly 60 percent ... So if a strain of H5N1 with that fatality rate were engineered to spread like seasonal flu,
hundreds of millions of people's lives would be at risk," Thomas
Inglesby, Director and CEO of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, is quoted as saying by CNSNews.com.

"Even a strain a hundred times less fatal would place at risk millions of people's lives," he added.

Source:-
http://www.naturalnews.com/038901_virologists_flu_virus_pandemic.html