"You are not going to believe this one," he told Ron Fouchier, a virologist at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. "I think we have an airborne H5N1 virus."
The news, delivered one afternoon last July, was chilling. It meant that Dr. Fouchier's research group had taken one of the most dangerous flu viruses ever known and made it even more dangerous - by tweaking it genetically to make it more contagious.
What shocked the researchers was how easy it had been, Dr. Fouchier said. Just a few mutations was all it took to make the virus go airborne.
The discovery has led advisers to the United States government, which paid for the research, to urge that the details be kept secret and not published in scientific journals to prevent the work from being replicated by terrorists, hostile governments or rogue scientists.
Some biosecurity experts have even said that no scientist should have been allowed to create such a deadly germ in the first place, and they warn that not just the blueprints but the virus itself could somehow leak or be stolen from the laboratory.
TVNL Comment: All the US media told you that the US was worried about this research falling into the wrong hands...they did not tell you that the US paid for the research in the first place!!!
The US justice department abruptly reversed course on Tuesday and decided it would defend executive...
Transgender Kansas residents have begun receiving letters from the state’s department of motor vehicles notifying them...
The FBI’s joint terrorism taskforce has been called in to help investigate a deadly mass shooting...
Newly released records show a US citizen was shot and killed in Texas by a federal...
