Obviously Someone thinks the bird flu is real...

Scientists re-create virus from pandemic of 1918 to help fight today's bird flu
By MIKE STOBBE

ATLANTA — It sounds like a sci-fi thriller. For the first time, scientists have made from scratch the Spanish flu virus that killed millions of people in 1918.
Why? To help them understand how to better fend off a future global epidemic from the bird flu spreading in Southeast Asia.
Researchers, who used the remains of a Spanish flu victim to reconstruct the virus, think their work offers proof the 1918 flu originated in birds and provides insights into how it attacked and multiplied in humans. In addition, this marks the first time an infectious agent behind a historic pandemic has been reconstructed.
The scientists involved in the project contend there's no real risk to public safety. The vials of the frightening virus — about 10 of them — are locked away at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, said Terrence Tumpey, the CDC scientist who constructed the virus.
However, at least one ethicist thinks there should be a broader public discussion before scientists take such steps.
"There isn't much input from the public. I think there should be," said Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics.
Like the 1918 virus, the current avian flu in Southeast Asia occurs naturally in birds. In 1918, the virus mutated, infected people and spread among them. So far, the current Asian virus has infected and killed at least 65 people, most of them in Vietnam, and killed millions of birds but has rarely spread person-to-person.
But viruses mutate rapidly and it could soon develop infectious properties such as those seen in the earlier one, said Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger of the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.
"The effort to understand what happened in 1918 has taken on a new urgency," said Taubenberger, who led the team that did the gene-sequencing for the project.
The research involved everything from excavation of human remains to application of the latest laboratory technology. "It's the sort of story you could tell high-school students to get them excited about science," said Dr. William Schaffner, a vaccine specialist at Vanderbilt University.

"It is a big day for science," said Schaffner, who was not involved in the project.
The Spanish flu of 1918 was a worldwide contagion that in a few months killed 20 million to 50 million worldwide, including roughly 550,000 in the United States.
In severe cases, victims' lungs filled with fluid and they essentially drowned. The illness was known for being particularly dangerous to young adults, a group usually less susceptible to flu complications than older people.
Some public-health experts think the virus also was devastating because of the malnutrition and poor living conditions that existed in the period at the end of World War I.
The reason the scientists think their reconstructed virus poses no public-health threat is that, based on previous research, modern-day medicines are effective against the 1918 flu. Scientists also think most people today are at least partially immune to it.
The subtype of virus that caused the 1918 pandemic is common and so would not be as unknown to the immune systems of people today and would not be as deadly, said Adolfo Garcia-Sastre, microbiologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
"In each pandemic, it's been a new subtype of virus," not an existing one, said Garcia-Sastre, who helped reconstruct the virus.
In research detailed yesterday in the journals Science and Nature, the scientists explained how they reconstructed that 1918 virus.
Using the remains of a female flu victim buried in the Alaskan permafrost in 1918, federal researchers sequenced the virus's genetic information. They shared it with Garcia-Sastre and others at Mount Sinai, who used the coding to create microscopic, viruslike strings of genes called plasmids. The plasmids then went to the CDC, where they were inserted into human kidney cells for the final step in the virus reconstruction.
"Once you get the plasmids inside the cell, the virus assembles itself," said Tumpey, the CDC scientist. "It only takes a couple of days."
A flu virus has eight gene segments. Taubenberger and other researchers previously had published the sequences of five of them; the new work completes it.
The three new segments appear to be crucial in explaining how the bird-based virus adapted to humans, Taubenberger said.
The gene-sequencing information from the new research is being placed in GenBank, a public database operated by the National Institutes of Health. Sequence information for smallpox and other deadly infectious agents is also stored there. It is accessible to scientists and others, including some who may have harmful intent.
But it won't be simple for terrorists or anyone else to reconstruct their own versions of the 1918 virus, said Diane Griffin, chairwoman of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health.
"These are not easy viruses to reconstruct," she said. "You're not going to do this in a cave in Afghanistan."
Researchers say their work was carefully reviewed before they were allowed to complete the reconstruction. Among the signoffs was an approval from the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, a panel created last year to advise federal health officials on biological research that might threaten public health.
That panel includes appointed experts who are outside government, so there was important public involvement in the process, Garcia-Sastre said.
Caplan, the ethicist, said he'd like to see more, but he added that the public until now hasn't been particularly interested in the kind of science that allows reconstruction of infectious agents.
"The power of synthetic genomics to make and re-create life is astounding," he said. But policy-makers and the public have been far more interested in human cloning, a development believed to be years away.