When they found no evidence of transmission, they serially passaged the mutated viruses for ten passages to allow the mutated viruses to adapt to ferrets. The team under Ron Fouchier introduced mutations previously identified to be important in host range determination and receptor binding and used adjacent cages to see if their influenza mutants would transmit between ferrets, similar to the Kawaoka team. The team found that several mutants were able to transmit between ferrets (Imai et al, 2012). Ferrets were infected with the mutated viruses and placed in adjacent cages with uninfected ferrets so that viral particles could travel between the cages. The research team under Yoshihiro Kawaoka introduced random mutations within a 143–amino acid stretch of the globular head of the influenza hemagglutinin surface protein. Eventually, both research teams could proceed with publication, and the unredacted articles-including the full sequence data-were published in Science and Nature in 2012.īoth sets of H5N1 experiments included introducing mutations to the influenza genome to observe resulting changes in phenotype related to transmissibility. The 60‐day pause eventually lasted more than 8 months, during which the topic of whether or how the research should be conducted and shared was hotly debated in forums assembled by the WHO, the US National Academies, and in the pages of newspapers and scientific journals. In early 2012, an international group of influenza researchers announced a 60‐day pause on research with highly pathogenic avian H5N1 viruses that could lead to enhanced transmissibility in mammals. They were concerned that details of these experiments, including the specific genetic changes associated with transmissibility, would enable nefarious actors to create an influenza‐based biological weapon. When both research groups attempted to publish their findings, the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, an advisory committee to the Director of the NIH, requested that publication be halted while the security implications of publishing were examined. In so doing, they created non‐naturally occurring viruses with higher transmissibility in mammals. Two laboratories independently sought to determine genetic markers associated with mammalian transmission, which could be used for public health surveillance (Herfst et al, 2012 Imai et al, 2012). There were concerns though that it might evolve to transmit more efficiently among humans while retaining its high mortality. During the early 2000s, H5N1 avian flu virus infected people with high rates of mortality-exceeding 60% but fortunately, the virus had only limited person‐to‐person transmission (CDC, 2015).
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