Leading scientists have condemned a decision to resume research using a mutant version of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus that could spread between humans amid fears it could leak out or fall into the wrong hands.
Flu researchers have decided to lift a voluntary moratorium on their studies, imposed 12 months ago after a public outcry over their work.
They hope the studies will help them prevent and deal with a future flu pandemic, and that the benefits outweigh potential risks such as a leak of the mutant viurus or the deliberate attempt to create deadly strains by terrorists or rogue governments.
In its current form, H5N1 spreads easily among poultry and wild birds but it is hard to transmit to humans and even harder between humans. But it has killed 360 out of 610 who have been infected since 2003.
Researchers engineered an airborne strain of the virus in December 2011 that was transmissible among mammals, before imposing the moratorium in order to explain the public health benefits of their work and put in place measures to minimise risks.
But Simon Wain-Hobson, professor of virology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "The risk is that we don't understand these viruses.
"We have no idea exactly how dangerous they would be if they were ever to get out. This work will be performed in high security labs but the track record is simply not perfect."
He said potential security problems had been "overlooked" and that, from an ethical point of view, it was not the job of scientists "to make the world a more dangerous place".
Professor Lord May, a former Government chief scientist and past president of the Royal Society, told the Independent: "As this research becomes more widely known and disseminated, there is the opportunity for evil people to pervert it.
"My other concern is the statistics of containment are not what they ought to be. The dangers of going ahead with the research outweigh the benefits of what may emerge."
The ending of the moratorium was announced in a letter signed by 40 flu scientists to the journals Science and Nature, which had published earlier studies by Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Winsconsin-Madison.
They discovered that they could mutate the H5N1 strain so that it could be transmitted by air between laboratiory ferrets, the standards animal used to study flu in humans.
Scientists fear that if airborne transmission becomes possible outside the lab it would lead to a deadly pandemic killing millions - leading some to press for such a mutation to be studied and others to fear the dangers by such research.
In their letter, the researchers wrote: "We fully acknowledge that this research - as with any work on infectious agents - is not without risks.
"However, because the risk exists in nature that an H5N1 virus capable of transmission in mammals may emerge, the benefits of this work outweigh the risks."
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