Avian flu and 1918

Big-name thinkers Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, have written a sobering opinion piece in the New York Times concerning the recent recreation of the 1918 flu virus, which killed 50 million people worldwide. The research was detailed in the journal Science, which made publication of the virus genome itself a condition for carrying the story. Kurzweil and Joy argue that was tantamount to putting the designs for a nuclear weapon online, except that tailoring a super-virus would actually be easier than building a bomb. A scientifically inclined and particularly misantropic terrorist could try to create a new, more virulent version of avian flu, for example.

Avian flu, or bird flu, in the news today is a strain called H5N1, which first was transmitted to humans in Hong Kong in 1997. When I visited Thailand last time, there were no rooster sounds in the morning. My favorite chicken rice stall was also closed. That was because bird-to-human transmissions had sparked a chicken-killing frenzy in that country. The worry is that if the virus mutates into a more easily transferrable strain, then it could lead to a pandemic. (Read the "Ten things you need to know about pandemic influenza" from the World Health Organization.)