NEW YORK — The second of two bird flu studies once considered too risky to publish was released Thursday, ending a saga that pitted concerns about terrorism against fears of a deadly global epidemic.
Both papers describe how researchers created virus strains that could potentially be transmitted through the air from person to person. Scientists said the results could help them spot dangerous virus strains in nature.
But in December, federal officials asked the researchers not to publish details of the work, which identified the genetic mutations used to make the strains. They warned the papers could show terrorists how to make a biological weapon.
That led to a wide-ranging debate among scientists and others, many of whom argued that sharing the results with other researchers was essential to deal with the flu risk.
Bird flu has spread among poultry in Asia for several years, but it only rarely jumps to humans. Scientists have long worried that if the virus picked up mutations that let it spread easily from person to person, it could take off in the human population, with disastrous results.
The two teams that conducted the controversial research eventually submitted revised versions of their papers to the federal biosecurity panel. They said the changes focused on things like the significance of the findings to public health, rather than the experimental details themselves.
One paper, from Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues, was published last month by the journal Nature. On Thursday, the journal Science published the second paper, from a team led by Ron Fouchier of the Netherland’s Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam.
Both papers tested the ability of the altered bird flu viruses to spread through the air between ferrets. The Fouchier paper reports that the virus could spread this way by acquiring as few as five specific mutations.
