aim to genetically modify the virus to see what it needs to give it more of a deadly pandemic kick. That could make it more virulent more pathogenic and more transmissible capable of passing easily in droplets through the air from one mammal to another. reuters.com/article/us-bir…
The highest level, BSL4, requires military guard and applies to pathogens for which there are no preventives or treatments.
The Erasmus team has one of Europe’s most secure laboratories - a so-called Enhanced BSL3, or Bio-Safety Level 3, lab - the highest level of biosecurity for academic research and a facility in which agents can be studied that cause “serious or lethal disease”
but don’t ordinarily spread between people and for which treatments or preventives exist.
The highest level, BSL4, requires military guard and applies to pathogens for which there are no preventives or treatments.
The highest level, BSL4, requires military guard and applies to pathogens for which there are no preventives or treatments.
Fouchier, one of only six people with security clearance to enter the Rotterdam lab, says that despite the presence of mutant viruses, he feels safer there than walking in the street.
“You need special keys to get in. You go though various changes of clothes and through all sorts of interlocked rooms,” he explained during a Reuters visit to the campus.
Like our #kids do when they go to school #covid😉
Like our #kids do when they go to school #covid😉
Fouchier spent years shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic arguing his case for conducting and publishing similar work on H5N1 bird flu which so alarmed US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity NSABB that it took unprecedented step of trying to censor publication
NSABB had said it feared work could fall into the wrong hands and be used for bioterrorism.
A year-long moratorium on such research followed while the World Health Organisation (WHO), U.S. security advisers and flu researchers sought ways to ensure the highest safety controls.
A year-long moratorium on such research followed while the World Health Organisation (WHO), U.S. security advisers and flu researchers sought ways to ensure the highest safety controls.
With those in place, the WHO satisfied and U.S. research funders broadly agreed, Fouchier and 22 other scientists announced in August that they planned to end the moratorium, and the Dutch team say now is the time to get going.
The easiest thing would be to back off and say OK, we won’t touch this any more’ But that’s not the right way to behave said #Osterhaus. As a scientist you have a responsibility towards the public. And if we can prevent a pandemic from happening, that could save millions of lives
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