Reading Room Production — page 380

I realize I'm limited in to what I can share here because of the classified nature of the briefing, but in short the briefing we received can be summed up by saying "We don't know much about anyone wanting to use this information for malevolent reasons, so it's probably not a risk." I would agree that few persons in the terrorism and intelligence worlds see this as a primary or even secondary weapon of choice for international terrorism for all the obvious reasons. But the absence of any discussions regarding international or national rogue scientists or irresponsible researchers not using adequate biosafety to conduct "now enabled work" was a major flaw in the briefing. These types of scientists are exactly the ones who would benefit immensely in conducting work of serious concern with the recipe and methods defined in fully published manuscripts. There was no discussion of eco-terrorists whose single purpose is to disrupt animal production activities. A release of a mammalian-transmitted H5N1 virus in swine would devastate that industry even if limited illness occurred because of the public relations issue of "killer bird flu virus in pigs." I can't think of a worse scenario than having H5N1 virus circulating widely in swine with a critical reassortment likely to occur and human transmission not far off. The briefing (or the meeting as a whole) did not cover the historical perspective of why influenza virus is truly different than any Class A pathogen we worry about because of it the consequences of its accidental release and our inability to stop transmission once it occurs in the community. As bad as an accidental release of variola virus, Bacillus anthracis, Yersinia pestis, or SARS virus might be, we could--based on agent transmissibility, incubation period, clinical recognition and countermeasures--effectively stop a global pandemic from occurring. We can't do that with influenza virus. There is no margin for error. We need look no further than the reemergence of H1N1 in 1977, after a 20-year absence from global circulation. Our group has been actively investigating the return of H1N1 in 1977, and based on that work we are convinced it leaked out of a Russian lab that was working on a live-attenuated H1N1 virus vaccine. Again, none of this information was addressed in the risk assessment overview. I am particularly concerned about this aspect of the two days of deliberations, because I heard several members remark how the security briefing had a substantial impact on their decision of how to vote. The use of the mutation data to enhance countermeasure preparedness. Although this issue came up several times in terms of the importance for sharing the mutation data for the development of countermeasures (vaccines and antiviral drugs), there were no datarelated presentations addressing this issue. Again the Science and Nature news stories of the previous three months did an outstanding job of researching the claim that the mutation data were critical in developing and deploying H5N1 countermeasures. The authors of the articles interviewed a number of global experts in the area of influenza countermeasures; they concluded there was no immediate benefit to countermeasure development or production as a result of the availability of the mutation data. At no time was this information presented to the Board by a disinterested expert.