Date: Sunday Jan. 15, 2012 4:09 PM
ET
The World Health Organization says it will take a role in helping sort through an international scientific controversy over two bird flu studies that the U.S. government says are too dangerous to publish in full.
The scientific and biosecurity communities have been mired in heated debate over the issue and many have been calling on the WHO to take a lead role in the discussions, saying any solution must be international in scope.
In an interview Sunday, a senior WHO official said the agency will pull together international talks aimed at fleshing out the short-and long-term issues that need to be addressed and then work to resolve them.
"It's the right organization to bring ... balance to the discussion to make sure that the technical and scientific and the political and the public health concerns are all brought together," Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's assistant director-general for health security and environment, told The Canadian Press.
But he insisted thoughtful deliberations will be needed to ensure that short-term solutions don't cause more problems over the long run.
"It's genuinely a set of difficult and very important questions," said Fukuda, a leading influenza epidemiologist.
"And I just very, very much want to make sure that we don't go off on one tangent or another, pulled by one loud voice saying 'this is the issue' when in fact there are several different issues. And that we do a good job about addressing them all."
Weeks of behind-the-scenes wrangling and debates erupted into the public view just before Christmas when the U.S. government announced its National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity had recommended two studies on H5N1 transmission should not be published in full.
The papers were slated to be published in the leading journals Science and Nature.
The research, led by virologists Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Yoshihiro Kawaoka, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, reports on how the dangerous virus could be...
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Health/201...tudies-120115/
The World Health Organization says it will take a role in helping sort through an international scientific controversy over two bird flu studies that the U.S. government says are too dangerous to publish in full.
The scientific and biosecurity communities have been mired in heated debate over the issue and many have been calling on the WHO to take a lead role in the discussions, saying any solution must be international in scope.
In an interview Sunday, a senior WHO official said the agency will pull together international talks aimed at fleshing out the short-and long-term issues that need to be addressed and then work to resolve them.
"It's the right organization to bring ... balance to the discussion to make sure that the technical and scientific and the political and the public health concerns are all brought together," Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's assistant director-general for health security and environment, told The Canadian Press.
But he insisted thoughtful deliberations will be needed to ensure that short-term solutions don't cause more problems over the long run.
"It's genuinely a set of difficult and very important questions," said Fukuda, a leading influenza epidemiologist.
"And I just very, very much want to make sure that we don't go off on one tangent or another, pulled by one loud voice saying 'this is the issue' when in fact there are several different issues. And that we do a good job about addressing them all."
Weeks of behind-the-scenes wrangling and debates erupted into the public view just before Christmas when the U.S. government announced its National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity had recommended two studies on H5N1 transmission should not be published in full.
The papers were slated to be published in the leading journals Science and Nature.
The research, led by virologists Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Yoshihiro Kawaoka, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, reports on how the dangerous virus could be...
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Health/201...tudies-120115/
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