Panel explains recommendations to omit avian flu study data
February 03, 2012
Members of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) this week said they recommended the omission of certain data in published research on H5N1, or avian flu, because doing so "maximized the benefits to society and minimized the risks" of bioterrorism.
In December, HHS—based on the recommendations of NSABB, a government advisory panel overseen by NIH—announced that it had asked the authors and the editors of the research, published in the journals Science and Nature, to exclude "details that could enable replication of the experiments by those who would seek to do harm." The NIH-funded studies involved a lab-created version of avian flu that is highly transmissible.
In a statement published in Science and Nature on Tuesday, NSABB members said they believed the availability of such data posed safety risks of "unusually high magnitude." They wrote that scientists for years have been concerned that biological research could be misused deliberately or in error, but they "suffered from a lack of specificity and a paucity of concrete examples." With H5N1, "[w]e are now confronted by a potent, real-world example," they added.
In a separate commentary published in mBio, the journal of the American Society for Microbiology, NSABB Acting Chair Paul Keim noted the ease with which scientists were able to create an easily transmissible version of the virus, adding, "A pandemic by such a pathogen could reasonably be concluded to cause such devastation that it should be prevented at all costs" (McNeil, New York Times, 1/31; Steenhuysen, Reuters, 1/31; Brown, "Booster Shots," Los Angeles Times, 1/31).
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