WHO-Linked Scientists Mixing Swine And Bird Flu To Create Deadly Virus

WHO-Linked Scientists Mixing Swine And Bird Flu To Create Deadly Virus

Last Updated on Saturday, 28 November 2009 11:00
Saturday, 28 November 2009 10:45
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INTENT ON CREATING A DEATH VIRUS

Swine flu and bird flu viruses are being mixed together by French professor , Bruno Lina, affiliated with WHO, potentially creating a lethal virus writes Ester Nordland on the internet news site Norway Health.

Lina and his team are carrying out this research into creating a lethal bioweapon under the pretext of having to predict the course of a future pandemic.


http://www.siste.no/Innenriks/helse/article4726428.ece

In one of the safest laboratories in the world, scientists are intent on mixing one of the most contagious viruses in this world with one of the most deadly ones, she writes.

The goal is to find out whether swine flu and bird flu can end up as a deadly mixture, writes the Norwegian news agency ANB.

Swine flu (H1N1) is very contagious, but ends up only killing a minority of the persons who actually get the flu.

Bird flu (H5N1), on the other hand, kills more than 60 percent of its human victims, but only in rare cases spreads from person to person.

Should those two viruses mix or mutate, a new horror virus might appear: A virus as devastating as the avian flu virus and as contagious as the swine flu virus.

At the Inserm laboratories biosecurity level 4 in Lyon in France deadly viruses like Ebola, Marburg and Hendra are locked in a safe. The laboratory is situated in a building that may withstand both earthquakes and explosions.

The researchers move around in protection equipment reminiscent of space suits withan inbuilt supply of oxygen.

Inserm is the national French institute for human health and medical research.

Now a team of researchers in Lyon intend to investigate whether the H1N1-virus will interfere with its more deadly relative H5N1 and become a virus with the most dreadful traits of both of them. If they discover what kind of mutations will occur, and what kind of influenza may appear, it might turn out to be a key to predict, how future pandemics will evolve.

Until now they have investigated, how H1N1 can develop resistancy towards the pharmaceutical product Tamiflu.

Now the primal investigator of the research team, Bruno Lina, hopes to be allowed to mix the two viruses. – It is a controversial study, but it is fundamental research which should be carried out, says Lina to the magazine Nature. – If you discover, what parts of the H5H1-virus is most prune to change, you are able to be more alert, if the virus change in those parts, says Lina.

Olav Hungnes coordinates the flu watch at Human Health Institute (Folkehelseinstituttet) in Norway. He says that it is a possibility, that the swine flu virus may change.

Hungnes explains that the genetic profile of the virus may chance in such a way, that it takes up genes from another virus.

The prerequisite of swine flu virus and avian virus mixing to a new and even more more dangerous virus is that they come together. But there are so few cases of avian flu among people, that the chances are low, says Hungnes.

Avian flu is most widespread in Southern Asia.

It is imagined that the pig may serve as a mixing pool for the two types of influenza. In those areas pigs, geese and human beings live together. But until now this has not happened, says senior medical doctor Bjørn Iversen, from Human Health Institute in Norway - Whether it will happen, nobody knows. What you belive in these questions, depends on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist. The optimist will say, that since it has not happened until now, it will never happen. The pessimist will say, that now it has tried so hard for such a long time, that it is just before it succeed. I believe that the possibility that it will actually happen is small. The avian flu virus has circulated since 1987. It came back in 2003, and in spite of the fact, that there has been a lot of normal seasonal influenza, it has not succeded in mixing with this, says Iversen.

According to Bjørn Iversen research in this area is taking place all over the world.

In an American laboratory, the researcher Jeffrey Taubenberger has managed to reconstruct the Spanish flu virus which laid the world waste at the beginning of the 20. century (1900-tallet). His team of researchers have cultivated a new live virus. (ANB)