Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
U.S. Panel May Re-Evaluate Bird Flu Research After Scientists Present New Data About Risks To Humans
Speaking at the American Society for Microbiology's (ASM) Biodefense and Emerging Diseases Research meeting in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, Ron Fouchier, the leader of the team at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands that genetically altered the bird flu virus, making it transmissible between ferrets and "touching off public fears of a pandemic, said ... that the virus he created was neither as contagious nor as dangerous as people had been led to believe ..., prompt[ing] the United States government to ask that the experiments be re-evaluated by a government advisory panel that recommended in December that certain details of the work be kept secret and not published," the New York Times reports (Grady, 2/29).
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