Exactly how much and which parts of the two controversial H5N1 studies will be published could be decided today and tomorrow during a meeting in Geneva. The World Health Organization (WHO) invited 22 experts from around the world to discuss and debate-whether and how to publish research that describes how scientists have made the avian H5N1 flu transmissible between ferrets, a mammal model common to the flu. The meeting is closed to the public and journalists, and the WHO has kept the guest list under wraps until now.
The final list has some surprises and is dominated by influenza experts. The only real stranger seems Jerome Singh, an expert on ethics and health law of the School R. Mandela Medical University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban, South Africa. Singh studied apartheid biological weapons program in South Africa, called Project Coast, which was active in the 1970s and 1980s
Also present were Ron Fouchier of Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led both studies and want to publish them in their entirety; Paul Keim, acting chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board for the National Biosecurity (NSABB), the panel that recommended to leave the key new details; Publishers Nature and Science , the two journals considering publishing the documents; and representatives of the five WHO collaborating centers for the study of influenza. Three representatives participate Indonesia, one of the hardest hit by H5N1 country. Indonesian lab would have given Fouchier virus he used as a starting material. There is a representative of the Vietnamese laboratory collaborates with which Kawaoka, and from which he received the sample of influenza used in its study.
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