"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," Chen said in an email.
"This tells us that high attention should be paid to monitor the emergence of such mammalian-transmissible virus in nature to prevent a possible pandemic caused by H5N1 virus," she said. "It is difficult to say how easy this will happen, but since the H5N1 and 2009/H1N1 viruses are widely existing in nature, they may have a chance to re-assort," she added.
The study, which was carried out in a laboratory with the second highest security level to prevent accidental escape, resulted in 127 different viral hybrids between H5N1 and H1N1, five of which were able to pass by airborne transmission between laboratory guinea pigs.
Professor Simon Wain-Hobson, an eminent virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, said it was very likely that some or all of these hybrids could pass easily between humans and possess some or all of the highly lethal characteristics of H5N1 bird-flu.
"We don't know the pathogenicity [lethality] in man and hopefully we will never know. But if the case fatality rate was between 0.1 and 20 per cent, and a pandemic affected 500 million people, you could estimate anything between 500,000 and 100 million deaths," he said. "It's a fabulous piece of virology by the Chinese group and it's very impressive, but they haven't been thinking clearly about what they are doing. It's very worrying," Wain-Hobson said.
An increasing number of scientists outside the influenza field have expressed concern over attempts to deliberately increase the human transmissibility of the H5N1 bird-flu virus. This is done by mutating the virus so it can pass by airborne droplets between lab ferrets, the standard "animal model" of human influenza.
Two previous studies, by Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, caused uproar in 2011 when it emerged they had created airborne versions of H5N1 that could pass between ferrets.
The criticism led researchers to impose a voluntary moratorium on their H5N1 research, banning transmission studies using ferrets. However, they lifted the ban earlier this year.
- Independent
