Freeze lifted on bird flu virus research

So.......they created this flu in a lab, which means it is not found in nature, and they were worried that "terrorists" (or population control freaks) might get their hands on it.....but..... "public health responsibility" requires they go on experimenting with this flu virus that body will ever encounter in nature because after all, it is a lab created mutant......

That make any sense to you?

Scientists who created a mutant bird flu virus will resume the controversial research after taking a year-long break amid fears the bug would escape the lab or fall into terrorist hands.

Citing a public health responsibility to continue the work, the teams said research will resume in countries whose governments had given the go-ahead, except in the United States and at US-sponsored research projects in other countries.
"We declare an end to the voluntary moratorium on avian-flu transmission studies," US-based journal Science and its British counterpart Nature said in an announcement.
Teams in the US and the Netherlands announced last month that they had engineered a hybrid of the H5N1 bird flu virus that was transmissible by air among mammals, in this case ferrets, which are considered a good research model for humans.
Publication of the results was delayed and work was halted for a year amid concerns terrorists may lay their hands on the data.
"We fully acknowledge that this research, as with any work on infectious agents, is not without risks," the scientists said, following extensive consultation with intelligence, health and security agencies.
"However, because the risk exists in nature that an H5N1 virus capable of transmission in mammals may emerge, the benefits of this work outweigh the risks."
In its current form, the virus spreads easily among poultry and wild birds but is hard to transmit to humans. It is even harder to pass on from human to human, which has only happened in isolated cases.
The virus is deadly in humans, killing 360 out of 610 people infected from 2003 to date, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Humans mainly contract the virus by handling live or dead infected birds, although there is no evidence of contamination from eating properly cooked poultry.
The scientists' work highlighted the risk of the virus evolving naturally to cause a pandemic in which it can be spread easily from human to human.
The research, the findings of which were published by Nature and Science in May and June last year, seeks to create models to enable us to deal with a potential human outbreak.

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