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WHO assistant director-general of health security and environment, Dr. Keiji Fukuda

Despite recommendations by the US on data censorship, the UN health body has asked scientists to publish the details of their study on a deadly flu virus strain.

After an urgent meeting between 22 elite global health experts in Geneva, the World Health Organization (WHO) urged scientists to publish their full discoveries about the lab developed H5N1 avian Flu strain.

The recommendation was issued after the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) asked scientists to censor data on their lab-made version of bird Flu.

The articles included a study by Yoshihiro Kawaoka and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US who submitted their paper to Nature and a Dutch team led by Dr. Ron Fouchier from the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, who wrote for Science.

NSABB said bioterrorist groups could potentially misuse the published research “for harmful purposes,” since the strain is possibly capable of spreading rapidly among humans.

Most of the UN panel members, however, believe that any theoretical risk of the virus being used by terrorists was far outweighed by the “real and present danger” of similar flu viruses in the wild.

“There is a preference from a public health perspective for full disclosure of the information in these two studies. However there are significant public concerns surrounding this research that should first be addressed,” said WHO assistant director-general of health security and environment Dr. Keiji Fukuda.

The WHO-convened panel emphasized that sharing the results among world scientists could help them identify the exact changes that might show whether a virus is developing the ability to cause a pandemic.

The group also announced that two controversial articles temporarily shelved would not be redacted and published in the near future, as originally planned. The research may be fully published at a later date instead.

SJM/TE

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WHO opposes flu study censorship