US playing with super virus fire

SCIENTISTS eager to genetically engineer viruses to become even more deadly – to understand how pandemics arise – have got the green light in the US.

The Government has lifted a moratorium on allowing such research to be funded.

The moratorium was introduced after experts raised fears that “monster” germs could possibly escape laboratories and unleash the very kind of pandemic they were intended to avert.

The New York Times says the next step to such studies is if a panel of scientists decides the benefits outweigh the risks and suitable security is in place.

Viruses mutate naturally. Every year new flu varieties sweep the world, exploiting different vulnerabilities.

Sometimes that mutation can be disastrous – such as the influenza that swept the world in 1918, killing 20–40 million people.

Some of the studies scientists wish to do involve identifying how common viruses – such as bird flu – can mutate in ways that make it easier for them to be transmitted or become more deadly to humans.

Understanding these processes can help medical science anticipate deadly mutations and do groundwork for effective vaccines.

But in 2014 all such federal research on the flu, severe acute respiratory syndrome and Middle East respiratory syndrome was stopped.

The Times quotes the head of the National Institutes of Health Dr Francis Collins as saying the new rules will allow any pathogen that can potentially cause pandemics, such as Ebola virus, to be studied.

Fears of an accidental release of a potentially deadly new virus rose in 2011 after virologists mutated the deadly avian flu into a form that could be transmitted through the air. It was tested on ferrets because of similarities between their respiratory system and ours.

It provoked public outcry, and major international science journals refused to publish its findings.

Other incidents have added fuel to the fears.

In 2015 it was reported the US Army accidentally sent live anthrax virus to Australia.

In 2014 the US National Institutes of Health in found a forgotten stash of supposedly eradicated smallpox virus that had been sitting in a freezer for 50 years.