Chinese Lab Has 'No Common Sense' For Creating 'Dangerous' Viruses, Health Experts Say

Chinese researchers are being condemned by heath officials in Great Britain for developing  potentially deadly new strains of influenza in a veterinary laboratory, according to The Independent.

Health experts have warned of the danger that the news strains of flu virus that were created by mixing bird-flu virus with human influenza could kill millions if the strain somehow escaped from the laboratory.

"They claim they are doing this to help develop vaccines and such like. In fact the real reason is that they are driven by blind ambition with no common sense whatsoever," said Oxford's Lord May a former government chief scientist and past president of the Royal Society, according to The Independent.

"The record of containment in labs like this is not reassuring. They are taking it upon themselves to create human-to-human transmission of very dangerous viruses. It's appallingly irresponsible," he said.

China's National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory at Harbin Veterinary Research Institute, the lab responsible for mixing the flu agents, reports that they did their research to investigate what happens when animals are co-infected with two different strains of virus.  The study was carried out under the second-highest security conditions to prevent accidental escape, but still produced 127 viral hybrids, five of which were able to pass to guinea pigs by airborne transmission.

The H5N1 bird-flu virus they have been experimenting with is extremely deadly, but not easily transmitted between people.  But the Chinese lab is testing hybrids of the virus created with a 2009 strain of the H1N1 flu virus, which is easily transmittable to humans.

"The studies demonstrated that H5N1 viruses have the potential to acquire mammalian transmissibility by re-assortment with the human influenza viruses," Professor Hualan Chen, who lead the Chinese research, wrote in an email to The Independent.

"This tells us that high attention should be paid to monitor the emergence of such mammalian-transmissible virus in nature to prevent a possible pandemic caused by H5N1 virus," she said.

"It is difficult to say how easy this will happen, but since the H5N1 and 2009/H1N1 viruses are widely existing in nature, they may have a chance to re-assort," she added.

Professor Simon Wain-Hobson, an eminent virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, praised the study as a "fabulous piece of virology," but warned that it might be research best left undone.

"They haven't been thinking clearly about what they are doing. It's very worrying," Professor Wain-Hobson said.

"The virological basis of this work is not strong. It is of no use for vaccine development and the benefit in terms of surveillance for new flu viruses is oversold."