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Thursday, October 06, 2005The scientists involved in the project contend there's no real risk to public safety. The vials of this frightening germ -- about 10 of them -- are locked away at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said Terrence Tumpey, the CDC research scientist who constructed the virus. ...The reason the scientists believe their reconstructed virus poses no public health threat is that based on previous research, modern-day medicines are effective against the 1918 flu. And they think most people today are already at least partially immune. The subtype of virus that caused the 1918 pandemic is now common, and so it would not be as unknown to the immune defense systems of people today. In other words, it would not be as deadly, said Adolfo Garcia-Sastre, microbiologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. ``In each pandemic, it's been a new subtype of virus,'' not an existing one, said Garcia-Sastre, who participated in the effort to reconstruct the virus. Can you say hubris? The virus they resurrected is not an existing one, either. It mutated itself out of existence after the epidemic. That's why they had to reconstruct it. And our modern day medicines aren't completely effective. They aren't curative, they just slow the influenza virus down a bit. P.S. Now we know why the CDC hasn't been sharing its data. posted by Sydney on 10/06/2005 08:52:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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