Research finally published showing how bird flu virus can spread among mammals

For years, public health officials have been watching the H5N1 bird flu virus warily. When it hops from birds to people, it has a disturbing tendency to kill them. So far, however, it has been unable to spread from person to person, which has kept the world safe from a lethal pandemic. That posed a rather significant question: could the bird flu ever evolve the ability to spread among mammals, and if it did, would it remain lethal?

Two teams of researchers, one in the US and the other in the Netherlands, set out to answer that question by selecting for a virus that could spread among ferrets, an animal commonly used for flu research. But the publications describing their work have been held up, as the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity debated whether the possibility of weaponizing the virus posed too large a risk. Now, finally, after months of debate, the first of the papers will appear in Nature. It provides a partial answer to the big question—it should be possible for the virus to spread among mammals—but doesn't address whether this would pose a threat.

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Drug resistant malaria takes new ground, raising fears of global spread

In Southeast Asia, drug-resistant falciparum malaria may have evolved resistance to another frontline therapy and established itself in new territory in western Thailand, according to the World Health Organization. The new area in Thailand joins previous hot spots in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Myanmar, with the latter being badly equipped to stanch further spread. Despite containment efforts, the possibility this strain may spread to Africa, which has the most significant malaria burden, remains very real.

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Counting the cost: the hidden price of coal power

Each year, the US sets off the equivalent of 20-30 atomic bombs worth of explosives, effectively obliterating entire features of its own landscape. Why? To get at the coal that's inconveniently located beneath the mountains of Appalachia.

That jaw-dropping figure came towards the end of a session at last month's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science called "The True Cost of Coal." Most methods of resource extraction and use come with various forms of what are called externalities, or costs that aren't included in the final product, but distributed across society as a whole in the form of things like environmental degradation and damage to health.

Calculating these hidden costs is obviously a challenge, and the researchers involved doing so tend to produce a range of values to reflect the uncertainty. But for coal, most of the estimates suggests that its true cost is about double the price of the energy produced with it, and may be quite a bit more.

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As worries rise, research continues to argue that avian flu isn’t that deadly

As regular readers of Nobel Intent will know, the avian influenza virus H5N1 has been responsible for a lot of sleepless nights among the public health community (and latterly, the biosecurity community). Back in 2005, when we knew much less about the virus, the thought of an airborne pathogen with 70 percent mortality was truly terrifying. Since then, mortality estimates have dropped a little, but not much. But are those estimates completely off the mark? A paper published in Science makes the case that they are.

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WHO calls for publication of the full details of the new avian flu virus

When it infects humans, the avian flu is unusually lethal, killing over half the people who come down with symptoms. But, so far at least, the virus has only spread from birds to humans, and not between humans. Recently, some labs evolved a version of the avian flu that can be transmitted among ferrets while retaining its lethal nature. The researchers who did this work sequenced the flu genome, identified all the genetic changes, and sent publications in to Science and Nature.

That's where things got complicated, with the journals delaying publication and the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity stepping in. The end result was a moratorium on further research, with the journals discussing publishing a censored form of the original papers. During this pause, the World Health Organization convened its own panel of experts who released a statement on Friday, calling for the moratorium on new research to be extended, and saying that the papers should be published in full, even if that means an extensive delay.

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Malaria deaths drop, but disease may be more lethal than we thought

The success of efforts that target polio have raised hopes that it could be the next human disease to be eradicated within the decade. But that's not the only disease that public health officials have targeted. The UN has actually set a goal of eliminating all deaths caused by malaria—by 2015. To reach that goal, development agencies boosted spending on malaria control efforts to over $1 billion annually over the course of the past decade. That has definitely had a significant impact on the disease, as all estimates of deaths due to malaria indicate it has been going down since about 2005. But the latest study of the disease suggests that we've been significantly underestimating how many people it has been killing.

Malaria is an extremely difficult parasite to control, in part because it's a complex organism. In contrast to viral and bacterial pathogens, malaria is caused by eukaryotes (from the genus Plasmodium), which have larger and more complex genomes. The parasites' complex genomes have helped them evolve various mechanisms for avoiding the immune system, as well as evolve resistance to most of the therapies we've developed.

Plasmodium also has a complex life cycle, spreading via mosquitos rather than direct, person-to-person contact. Although this lets us limit the spread of the disease by targeting mosquitos, those organisms have also evolved resistance to the chemicals that once killed them. For example, DDT was once used so indiscriminately that it's now useless against mosquitos in many tropical regions.

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Study of deadly flu sparks debate amidst fears of new pandemic

The 2009 flu pandemic, although not especially deadly, revealed just how quickly a new influenza virus could elude surveillance and spread internationally. It also left health experts eying the disease that many fear could cause the next pandemic: H5N1, the avian flu. According to World Health Organization standards, that virus is phenomenally deadly, killing about half the people that contract it. So far, however, almost all the known cases came from people who were in direct contact with poultry; the flu doesn't seem to spread among mammals.

The great unanswered question was whether we could continue to rely on H5N1's limited transmission. Recently, some researchers set out to answer that question, and came up with a disturbing answer: it was relatively easy to evolve a form of H5N1 that spread in ferrets, another mammalian species, without it losing any of its virulence. Two labs identified the exact mutations that enabled this new host range, and were preparing to publish their results in Science and/or Nature. At that point, the US government's National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) responded by requesting that the journals delay publication and limit the content released. That, in turn, prompted the viral research community to put a two-month hold on further research.

That's where things stood on February 2, when the New York Academy of Sciences hosted a panel discussion on H5N1 and other dual-use research (research that has both public benefit and weapons applications). The panel included two members of the NSABB, representatives from both Science and Nature, a number of virus researchers, a public health expert, and a member of the Defense Department, and they spent two hours in a lively and sometimes contentious discussion of how to handle our current situation.

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India triumphs over polio, with no new cases in a year

In the year since January 13, 2011, India has had zero cases of polio. Previously, India led the world, accumulating over 5,000 cases since 2000. Polio's last victim in India was 18 month-old Rukhsar, a girl in West Bengal who began showing signs of paralysis on this day in 2011. Now, epic immunization efforts have brought global eradication of the disease a giant step closer. Outside India, however, backsliding Pakistan and Nigeria and splotches of polio across Africa have blocked the final stamping out of the disease worldwide.

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Fighting on after the war is over, HIV contrarian publishes yet another paper

When the world first learned of AIDS, there was a lot of justifiable confusion over what could cause such a confusing array of symptoms. But, over time, the confusion slowly subsided. A virus, HIV, was found that infected the right cells and spread in the right ways to explain the progression of the disease. Public health measures that targeted it slowed its spread, and drugs designed to target the virus helped extend the lives of those infected. By now, the Nobel Prizes have been awarded and the evidence that HIV causes AIDS is so comprehensive, it's treated as a fact.

But not by everyone. As attention first focused on HIV, a handful of scientists very publicly raised questions about whether the scientific evidence was as solid as others thought. And, years later, at least one's still at it: Berkeley molecular biologist Peter Duesberg. Last month, after his latest effort to see his arguments published ended up in a retraction and the firing of an editor-in-chief, Duesberg managed to get it published in the Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology.

It's a rather dramatic path to publication for a paper. But anyone familiar with Duesberg's sometimes flamboyant contrarian nature wouldn't be surprised.

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