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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.

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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

Patients with HIV infections are 4 1/2 times more likely to die suddenly from cardiac arrest than people without HIV, even if the virus is under control and they appear relatively healthy, according to a UCSF study.

The report, published Monday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, found that sudden cardiac death - which occurs when the heart unexpectedly stops beating - was the second-most common killer among HIV-positive patients. AIDS was the most common cause of death.

Researchers involved in the 10-year study believe no single cause is involved but say HIV patients and their doctors need to be more vigilant about being screened and treated for heart disease risks like high blood pressure and high cholesterol as their lives are being extended by antiretroviral drugs.

"Cardiac disease is a big issue as these people are living longer," said Dr. Zian Tseng, a UCSF electrophysiologist and lead author of the study. "HIV providers need to be aware of the risk of these patients dying suddenly."

Over the past two decades, the treatment of HIV has changed dramatically with the success of antiretroviral drugs. The medications can, in many people, suppress the virus to the point where it's undetectable in a patient's blood, and doctors have begun to see HIV infection as a chronic condition and not a death sentence.

But the trade-off is that the virus does damage over time, and perhaps so do the drugs used to treat it. Add to that the fact that HIV patients were slow to adjust to the idea that they could live much longer on the drugs, said Dr. Priscilla Hsue, director of the HIV Cardiology Clinic at San Francisco General Hospital and an author of the UCSF study.

They were reluctant to stop lifestyle choices that contributed to heart disease, such as smoking or heavy drinking, she said. But patients, and their doctors, are beginning to understand, and their thinking is changing, Hsue said.

"Now they're thinking, 'I could live another 25 years if I take care of myself,' " Hsue said. "And I'm really hammering on stop smoking, take blood pressure medication, watch your cholesterol."

The study looked at 2,860 HIV-positive patients who were treated in San Francisco General Hospital's HIV/AIDS ward from 2000 to 2009. In that period, 230 died - 57 percent of them from AIDS, 13 percent from sudden cardiac death, 11 percent from other natural diseases, and 19 percent from suicides, overdoses or unknown causes.

Notably, 86 percent of all cardiac deaths among those patients were sudden. In the general population, the number of sudden deaths is about half of those who have heart-related deaths.

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Study: Sudden heart death high among HIV patients

Scientists at the US Department of Energys Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have harnessed the energy producing power of a harmless phage virus.

According to Forbes.com, "The scientists coated a postage-stamp-sized electrode with specially engineered, harmless viruses that, when tapped, generated enough electricity to power a small LCD display."

The power produced by the resulting viruses didnt generate a huge amount of electricity, Forbes.com noted. In fact they produced, "just six nanoamperes, the equivalent of about one-quarter the voltage supplied by a AAA battery but it was a start."

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In the group's abstract published in Nature Nanotechnology they said, "we develop a phage-based piezoelectric generator that produces up to 6 nA of current and 400 mV of potential and use it to operate a liquid-crystal display. Because biotechnology techniques enable large-scale production of genetically modified phages, phage-based piezoelectric materials potentially offer a simple and environmentally friendly approach to piezoelectric energy generation."

The scientists explained Piezoelectricity is, "the accumulation of a charge in a solid in response to mechanical stress."

In short, a harmless virus produces energy by converting mechanical energy into electricity. In the future, every time you take a walk, the movement of your feet could be transformed into electricity to charge your cell phone by paper thin sheets of the virus in the sole of your shoe.

Corresponding author Seung-Wuk Lee said in a statement, "More research is needed, but our work is a promising first step toward the development of personal power generators, actuators for use in nano-devices, and other devices based on viral electronics."

The group shared their findings in a video.

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Scientists harness virus energy (VIDEO)