New influenza strain created in Chinese lab?

New influenza strain created in Chinese lab? Experts Say Bird Flu Virus Mixed With Human Variant Poses Danger Steve Connor      Senior scientists have criticized the “appalling irresponsibility” of researchers in China who have deliberately created new strains of influenza virus in a veterinary laboratory. They warned there is a danger that the new viral strains created by mixing bird-flu virus with human influenza could escape from the laboratory to cause a global pandemic killing millions of people.     Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist and past president of the Royal Society, denounced the study published on Friday in the journal Science as doing nothing to further the understanding and prevention of flu pandemics.     “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,” Lord May said.     “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. The controversial study into viral mixing was carried out by a team led by professor Hualan Chen, director of China’s National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory at Harbin Veterinary Research Institute. Chen and her colleagues deliberately mixed the H5N1 bird-flu virus, which is highly lethal but not easily transmitted between people, with a 2009 strain of H1N1 flu virus, which is very infectious to humans.     When flu viruses come together by infecting the same cell they can swap genetic material and produce “hybrids” through the re-assortment of genes. The researchers were trying to emulate what happens in nature when animals such as pigs are co-infected with two different strains of virus, Chen said.     “The studies demonstrated that H5N1 viruses have the potential to acquire mammalian transmissibility by re-assortment with the human influenza viruses. This tells us that attention should be paid to monitor the emergence of such virus in nature to prevent a possible pandemic caused by H5N1 virus,” she said. THE INDEPENDENT