Health experts from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Yale School of Public Health warned that bird flu experiments could be a great threat to human lives.
The warning was released after other studies reported on the success of controlling virulent flu strains' ability to pass between ferrets, which responded to the virus in a way similar to humans. These probes on potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs) were intended to pave the way for better flu surveillance and vaccine design and were conducted under high levels of biosecurity.The scientists were looking for safer alternatives for the experiments that make virulent influenza strains transmissible, as well as research in the future that would entail flu transmission.
Researchers detailed how experiments on dangerous flu strains could become dangerous to human lives once released.
"These recent studies raise strong ethical questions. We have accepted principles, embodied in the Nuremberg Code, that say that biomedical experiments posing a risk to human subjects should only be undertaken if they provide benefits that sufficiently offset the risks - and if there are no other means of obtaining those benefits. Although these experiments don't involve people directly, they do put human life and well-being at risk," lead author Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard said in a press release.
Yale's Alison Galvani also agreed that there were other safe and effective methods for studying the flu virus. She also added that the benefits from the experiments should not prevail over the risks of an accidental release and a global spread of the virus.
According to the study, if 10 high-containment laboratories in the United States run the experiments for a decade, the risk of at least one laboratory-acquired flu infection spreading would be around 20 percent. The researchers appealed to the U.S government as well as other funders of the experiments to undertake a risk-benefit analysis before supporting more PPP research.
Further details of the study were published in the May 20 issue of PLOS Medicine.
