Diary Prequel Package — page 271

Science) oxymoron. Christ Feig is a former CNN producer and old friend of mine and is the communications director for WHO. I noticed the slip-up and she got Keiji to correct while still on the TV press conference. Emails were going back and forth from me to HHS (Bill Hall) to some of the NSS people when he made this mistake, but everyone calmed down after he corrected it. I was in the unusual position of officially sticking with the NSABB recommendation while being the one who actually led the WHO discussion to come to this point. The smart reporters like Jon Cohen and Helen Branswell picked this up and were sympathetic. The decision was written up on the front page of the NY Times by Denise Grady on Sunday. It was interesting how she quoted me with an articulate explanation of why the WHO group came to this decision at the same time that she mentioned that I stuck by the NSABB recommendations. Anyone with insight could figure out what I did. Of note, Paul Keim did not realize that the aerosol-transmitted H5N1 did not make the animals ill, much less kill them!!! There was a media storm after the decision was announced. See below for summary of meeting: Sunday, February 19, 2012 Summary of discussion at the WHO Geneva Meeting on Feb. 16-17, 2012 plus additional discussion with Ron Fouchier and Yoshi Kawaoka. Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. Fouchier Experiments (Science) and related information: Fouchier worked with a high pathogenicity (HP) H5N1 influenza virus obtained from a patient in Indonesia (A/Indonesia/5/05). He had been working for 4 to 5 years on trying to study the transmissibility of H5N1 for the purposes of determining the molecular aspects of increased transmissibility. His attempts at developing an H5N1 with increased transmissibility in a mammalian model have failed up to now. Recently, he used the already existing literature to identify the mutations that have been reported to be associated with the emergence of previous pandemics (1918 H1N1, 1957 H2N2, 1968 H3N2, 2009 H1N1 and other non-pandemic outbreaks, e.g. 1977 H1N1). He analyzed these and determined the 3 mutations that statistically seemed to be associated most closely with emergence of pathogenic pandemic viruses. Again, these mutations have already been reported in many published papers. With regard to the "technique" of passaging in ferrets, there are many papers that have appeared in the literature for decades (since the 1930s) describing the ferret passage technique to increase transmissibility. This is similar to passage techniques widely used to adapt a virus to a particular species. It has been done in mice, monkeys, etc. Usually (not always), when viruses are passaged in a particular species, as they gain transmissibility, i.e. species-specific adaptation, they develop decreased pathogenicity, i.e. attenuation.