millions at risk

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H5N1 flu virus could put millions at risk

Thomas Inglesby, CEO and director of the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, asked the Senate Homeland Security Committee last week. The result would be millions dead and even more at risk for contracting the deadly flu.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Seasonal flu affects 10 to 20 percent of the world every year--as much as a billion people or more," Inglesby says.

"The case fatality rate of wild H5N1 in the WHO database is nearly 60 percent, as you indicated. So if a strain of H5N1 with that fatality rate were engineered to spread like seasonal flu, hundreds of millions of people's lives would be at risk. Even a strain a hundred times less fatal would place at risk millions of people's lives."

Concern has grown recently over advances in the field of biotechnology, in which scientists have created synthetic viruses in laboratories.

Inglesby says that mistakes can be made in laboratories, like the one in 1977 when "H1N1 caused a mini-pandemic, probably from a lab escape.

"Nine years ago during SARS, there were at least three incidents in which researchers working in BL-3 or BL-4 labs in Singapore, Taiwan and China accidentally infected themselves with SARS," Inglesby said. "We have to factor the possibility of human error, surprise and accidents into our calculations of the risk of this research," he added.

http://www.catholic.org/health/story.php?id=45969