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The Claim: A lab-concocted strain of ferret flu could become a doomsday weapon or bioterrorist threat.

The Contrarian: Wendy Orent, author of Plague, says the much-hyped fears are unfounded: The new strain presents no danger to humans but reveals a great deal about the transmission of flu.

Ferrets with the flu sneeze and cough like humans.

iStockphoto

Deadly H5N1 avian flu, long entrenched in Asian poultry, has terrified public health experts ever since it killed a Hong Kong boy in 1997. The disease has caused about 340 human deaths in all, raising concerns it might someday unleash a true pandemic. But that has never occurred. The virus is adept at killing chickens and can infect mammals, but it has never spread among them. Until recently no one knew why.

Last year two scientists independently set out to learn what genetic changes might make H5N1 contagious (and so more dangerous) among mammals. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin at Madison studied a hybrid flu virus made from the avian H5 and the human H1N1 pandemic flu of 2009. Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, genetically altered his H5 strain by changing its receptors so the virus could infect cells higher in the respiratory tract. Then, they stuck their strains deep up the noses of ferrets.

By inserting nasal secretions from the first infected ferret into the nose of another and repeating that passaging from ferret to ferret, both teams allowed natural selection to choose the genetic variants of flu best at growing and spreading in ferrets. After 10 such passages, the virus was able to spread in the air, infecting ferrets in separate cages. Kawaokas ferrets got sick but survived, while 60 percent of Fouchiers died. When the scientists sequenced the genome of the new virus and compared it with the original strain, they discovered about five changes that allowed ferrets to pass the germ on.

The results were accepted for publication, but the U.S. National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity worried that Fouchiers and Kawaokas work might be dangerous in the wrong hands. Members of the board demanded that the genetic recipe for ferret flu be redacted before publication, sparking public hysteria: Had the scientists created lethal, transmissible human viruses? Could the microbe accidentally escape from a lab or fall into terrorist hands to become, as a New York Times editorial called it, a doomsday weapon?

The uproar made no sense. The ferret experiments do not replicate a natural evolutionary process. Without the experimenters deliberately moving the viruses from ferret nose to ferret nose, a contagious strain would never have evolved. To make a deadly human flu, you would need to passage the strain among humans, not ferretsa difficult and ethically impossible experiment.

Virologist Earl Brown of the University of Ottawa points out that passaging a virus from one animal to another increases the virulence of the germ for the newly infected species and decreases its virulence for the original host. Indeed, weakening influenza strains by passaging them in animals is an old technique for making human vaccines, including those for polio and yellow fever, according to virologist Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University. The ferret strains created in these experiments are probably closer to a human vaccine than a doomsday weapon.

Continued here:
Can Stuffing Germs up Ferrets Unleash a Human Pandemic? | DISCOVER

By Timothy W. Martin

U.S. health officials are proposing all baby boomers get tested for hepatitis C, because theyre five times more likely than other adults to have the potentially fatal liver virus and many might not know theyre at risk.

Of the more than 70 million baby boomers those born from 1945 to 1965 800,000 may have contracted the liver virus decades ago from unsafe blood transfusions or experimental drug use and not gotten tested, U.S. health officials say. Many neglect getting tested, because theyve forgotten getting a transfusion or drug use, or theyre unaware they could be at risk. For those baby boomers who do remember risky actions, some may balk at telling their doctor.

So, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday proposed a recommendation that all members of that generation get a one-time blood test for Hepatitis C. About two-thirds of the 3.2 million U.S. adults with hepatitis C is a baby boomer, the CDC said.

Hepatitis C doesnt exhibit many symptoms. It slowly inflames or scars the liver, for years, if not decades. If undiagnosed, hepatitis C can cause liver cancer or cirrhosis, and U.S. health officials said more than 15,000 Americans died from those illnesses in 2007, the most recent data available.

The proposed recommendation comes as treatments battling hepatitis C are improving. For decades, it was combated with an injection that, under the best of circumstances, would clear out 30% to 40% of the virus, Dr. Paul Gaglio, medical director of the liver-transplantation program at Montefiore Medical Center in New York tells the Health Blog. Now, the injections are being paired with two new types of oral tablets, developed by Merck and Vertex Pharmaceuticals, that can block the virus from replicating. The combined therapy has doubled the treatments effectiveness, Gaglio says.

Our hope is that one day well have treatments that produce a near 100% clearance of the virus, he says.

The CDC guidelines, for now, call for hepatitis C testing only for individuals with certain known risk factors say, a blood transfusion before 1992 or admitted recreational intravenous drug use. The proposed recommendation, which could be enacted later this year, would suggest that all of the more than 70 million baby boomers get tested.

Hepatitis C is a huge unrecognized health crisis, says Dr. Bryce D. Smith, lead health scientist at the CDCs division of viral hepatitis. Its referred to as a silent killer, because there are so few noticeable symptoms.

For previous generations, blood transfusions and recreational drug use were less common, experts said. And for younger adults, universal standards were established in the early 1990s for more widespread blood screening of donors. The HIV scare, around the same time, led to more cautious drug use, especially for those doing so by injection.

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U.S. Suggests All Baby Boomers Should Get Tested for Hepatitis C

1 in 30 Baby Boomers Infected With Hepatitis C, but Few Know It

May 18, 2012 -- One in 30 baby boomers may be infected with the hepatitis C virus, but few know it until it's too late for their livers.

In the wake of new statistics showing more than 2 million baby boomers in the U.S. are infected with hepatitis C, the CDC is proposing new guidelines calling for all adults of that generation to be tested for the virus.

Officials say baby boomers, the generation born from 1945 through 1965, now account for more than 75% of all Americans living with the virus. But recent studies show few are aware they are infected or at risk for infection.

"Identifying these hidden infections early will allow more baby boomers to receive care and treatment, before they develop life-threatening liver disease," says Kevin Fenton, MD, PhD, director of CDC's National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention, in a news release.

Current hepatitis C testing guidelines call for only those with certain risk factors to be tested for the virus.

The announcement of the proposed change coincides with the first-ever National Hepatitis Testing Day on May 19. After a public comment period, the new guidelines are expected to be finalized later this year.

The hepatitis C virus is spread through exposure to infected blood. The most common means of infection is through sharing of needles or other equipment used to inject drugs.

Researchers say most baby boomers were likely infected with hepatitis C when they were in their teens or 20s.

Some may have been infected when they experimented with injection drugs, even just once. Others may have been exposed to the virus through blood transfusions before modern blood-screening procedures came into effect in 1992.

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CDC: All Baby Boomers Should Get Tested for Hepatitis C

By DANIEL WOOLLS and HAROLD HECKLE Associated Press

MADRID (AP) - Concern grew for the stability of Spain's place in the fragile eurozone economy after reports of a rise in the level of bad loans on the books of its banks and word from the government Friday that it may have to revise its 2011 budget deficit upwards for a second time.

The Bank of Spain reported that lenders' and savings banks' bad loan ratio had risen in March to an 18-year high of 8.36 percent from 8.15 percent the previous month.

The Finance Ministry then said in a statement late Friday the deficit could reach 8.9 percent of GDP after four of its 17 regions overshot their expected budgets. The regions mentioned were Madrid, Valencia, Andalusia and Castilla-Leon.

News of the increase in bad loans followed a downgrading by credit ratings agency Moody's late Thursday of the country's banking industry.

Spain's budget deficit is higher than the 3 percent threshold that was supposedly part of the euro's economic framework. The incoming government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy earlier had to revise the figure upwards to 8.5 percent of GDP from the 6 percent forecast by the previous, Socialist government.

The ministry said it still expected to hit its target of 5.3 percent for this year's budget deficit.

Moody's acted late Thursday, citing Spanish banks' heavy load of non-performing loans amid a recession-plagued economy, their trouble raising financing on capital markets and the government's sovereign debt problems, which might make it hard for the government to come to the aid of banks.

Spain is in the eye of the storm of the eurozone debt crisis amid worries that its banks are overexposed to an imploded real estate bubble and the government, fighting recession and a nearly 25 percent jobless rate, could not afford to bail them out if it needed to.

Nuria Alvarez, a banking analyst with Madrid brokerage Renta4, warned that the rise in the bad loan ratio could mean that Spain's banks will get hit harder as the country's recession bites deep and unemployment worsens.

The rest is here:
Spain may have to revise its 2011 budget deficit

By RAPHAEL SATTER Associated Press

LONDON (AP) - British officials have given their word: "We won't read your emails."

But experts say that its proposed new surveillance program, unveiled last week as part of the government's annual legislative program, will gather so much data that spooks won't have to read your messages to guess what you're up to.

The U.K. Home Office stresses that it is not seeking to read the content of every Britons' communications, saying the data it was seeking "is NOT the content of any communication." It is, however, seeking information on who's sending the message, whom it's sent to, where it's sent from, and potentially other details including a message's length and its format.

The government's proposal is just a draft bill, so it could be modified or scrapped. But if passed in its current form, it would put a huge amount of personal data at the government's disposal, which it could potentially use to deduce a startling amount about Britons' private life - from sleep patterns to driving habits or even infidelity.

"We're really entering a whole new phase of analysis based on the data that we can collect," said Gerald Kane, an information systems expert at Boston College. "There is quite a lot you can learn."

The ocean of information is hard to fathom. Britons generate 4 billion hours of voice calls and 130 billion text messages annually, according to industry figures. In 2008 the BBC put the annual number of U.K.-linked emails at around 1 trillion. Then there are instant messaging services run by companies such as BlackBerry, Internet telephony services such as Skype, chat rooms, and in-game services liked those used by World of Warcraft.

Communications service providers, who would log the details of all that back-and-forth, believe that the government's program would force them to process petabytes (1 quadrillion bytes) of information every day. It's a mind-bogglingly large amount of data on the scale of every book, every movie, and every piece of music ever released.

So even without opening emails, how much can British spooks learn about who's sending them?

THEY'LL SEE THE RED FLAGS

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UK surveillance could yield window into lives