Flown the coop Controversial flu research is published SOME said
Ron Fouchier's work would help fend off a pandemic. Others
called it a terrorist's cookbook. Authorities on either side of
the Atlantic spent months examining the research. Now the rest
of the world can read it, too. In a paper just published in
Science, Dr Fouchier explains how bird flu might adapt to spread
easily from person to person. The publication caps a long fight
over whether the paper's benefits outweighed its risks. But this
controversy will not be the last. The prospect of a highly
contagious H5N1 virus is scary. It can already hop nimbly from
bird to bird, but is less acrobatic in humans. Some fear that if
it ever adapted, the “Spanish flu” of 1918, which is reckoned to
have killed as many as 100m people, could seem like a common
cold by comparison. Of the 600 cases of H5N1 infection diagnosed
since 2003, almost 60% have been lethal. Dr Fouchier, of the
Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands, and Yoshihiro
Kawaoka, of the Univers