Should Journals Describe How Scientists Made a Killer Flu?

H5N1 avian flu rarely infects humans, but it is deadly when it does. Since the virus first emerged in humans in Hong Kong in 1997, nearly 600 people have been infected worldwide and almost 60% have died.

The virus isn’t very transmissible, but scientists have long worried that it might mutate, perhaps through reassortment with a human flu strain, and gain the ability to pass easily from person to person like human flus, such as the H1N1/A strain that triggered a pandemic in 2009. More than a decade since its emergence in humans, however, that fear has yet to come true, and H5N1 remains only an occasional threat for the rare person who contracts it — usually from close contact with a sick bird.

If H5N1 gained the ability to spread virulently, we might face another world-changing virus like the 1918 flu, but so far, at least, we’ve been lucky.

But just because nature hasn’t figured out a way to create an easily transmissible H5N1 doesn’t mean that scientists can’t. In experiments conducted at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, researchers engineered a strain of H5N1 that spread easily between ferrets — which means it can probably spread easily between people. (Ferrets are a commonly used animal model for studying human flu.)

It’s not clear how the scientists did it — most of the information has been coming out piecemeal in scientific presentations and interviews since September. The next logical step would be for the researchers to publish studies in major scientific journals, describing the newly created flu, including its genetic makeup. And that would mean that anyone with the proper scientific training — from another researcher to a terrorist — would likely be able to read the studies and potentially make the new H5N1 themselves.

Cognizant of that risk, on Tuesday the U.S. government did an unprecedented thing: it asked scientific journals not to publish the details of the H5N1 experiments, for fear that the information could fall into the wrong hands and be used to create a bioweapon. But while it seems likely that the two journals in question — Science and Nature — will hold off from publishing the ingredient list for the super-H5N1, they will almost certainly release papers on the studies and their conclusions. And that alone might be enough for a dedicated reader to figure out the recipe for themselves.