Yet Another Moronic Potential Policy Shift of a US Government Agency

1918 flu breeds modern worries

In an apparent change of policy, the CDC may allow scientists broader access to the resurrected 1918 flu pandemic virus --- leading a top international science journal to scold the agency because the once-lethal virus might escape.

The long-lost virus --- which killed an estimated 50 million people around the world in 11 months --- was reconstructed earlier this year in a high-security biotech lab at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta with the help of research teams from New York and Washington.

When the CDC announced the re-creation Oct. 5, Director Julie Gerberding said the agency would not share the virus with other research teams unless they agreed to work in the CDC's Atlanta labs.

Now, however, the CDC may have changed its mind. The journal Nature reports today that the agency has agreed to send the virus to labs that take appropriate biosafety precautions and register under the federal government's "select agents" program, which sets rules for handling dangerous organisms and potential bioterror agents.

In a separate editorial, Nature warns: "The 1918 flu virus is hard to contain and is capable of spreading rapidly between people. . . . The threat of an accidental release is real."

More...

CDC May Send 1918 Flu To Various US Labs

About 10 vials of virus were created, each containing about 10 million infectious virus particles. CDC officials said at the time the particles would be stored at a CDC facility in Atlanta, and that there were no plans to send samples off campus.
In addition to creating the virus, the scientists said they would place the gene-sequencing information from the new research in GenBank, a public database operated by the National Institutes of Health.
GenBank will allow some research groups to build their own virus, rather than seek samples of what the CDC had created.

Originally posted by Dr Love
The only purpose of this article is to scare us...............that's it.

Originally posted by Dr Love
What's the point of this article??????