Crazy Canucks To Cook-up Killer Contagion!

I found this on Matthew's Canadian Blog:

Scientists at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg plan to follow the lead of U.S. researchers and resurrect the virus that caused the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, a development that has led to calls for international oversight and control of the dreaded microbe. The Canadian researchers plan to bring the virus to life using pieces of DNA that contain the genetic recipe for the virus.

The virus will be recreated inside living cells, then harvested and used to infect animals in an attempt to identify what made it so virulent, said Frank Plummer, scientific director of the lab.
Depending on how quickly the scientists work, Plummer said, they could have a live 1918 flu virus within six months.

The micro-organism killed as many as 50 million people when it swept around the world in 1918-19. There are fears an accidental release of the recreated microbe could be catastrophic.

Jens Kuhn, a virologist and bioweapons expert at Harvard Medical School, says the Canadian project - which has been approved by the Public Health Agency of Canada - should not have been allowed to proceed without international approval and oversight. Kuhn insisted the virus should never have been recreated: “We have enough bugs to deal with on this planet already.�

--------------------------

Neato! Can India recreate the strain too? Pakistan will want to do it then, and France, UK, Russia, China, Sout Korea: let's all remake the 1918 flu! What a good idea! Let's recombinate it with H5N1, just for kicks!

I agree that it would be very useful information to know why the Spanish Flu was so deadly, I'm just not sure the only way to do that is to remake it and infect some lab animals -- to me that seems like the most reckless and needlessly dangerous way to find out. I mean, they just got the genome mapped a couple of months ago, why not just look at that for a little while, see if you can figure it out without reintroducing a dangerous pathogen into the world?