New flu research creates worldwide concern

Commenting in a recent issue of Nature (Jan. 19), ASU professor Ed Sylvester and scientist Lynn Klotz, say the recent round of research at two labs that created a potentially contagious form of H5N1 has everyone on edge. And with good reason.

Klotz, of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, Washington, D.C., and Sylvester, of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, state that using one percent as the estimated probability of escape (historical average) from a single lab in a single year and applying that to the 42 labs around the world working on deadly and contagious pathogens such as SARS, the resurrected 1918 pandemic flu virus and the human-contagious H5N1, the probability of escape from at least one of the 42 labs per year becomes 34 percent. Within less than four years it is 80 percent. If more labs begin studying the human contagious form of H5N1, the interval will decrease even further.

“We are creating a risk that is much greater than that posed by nature,” Klotz and Sylvester state. “Regulators should not be sitting idly by, while the threat of a man-made pandemic looms.”

In 2009, Klotz and Sylvester wrote “Breeding Bio Insecurity: How U.S. Biodefense is Exporting Fear, Globalizing Risk, and Making Us All Less Secure” (University of Chicago Press), which addresses this very issue.