米国国内で鳥インフルエンザウイルスの機能獲得実験をやって事故を起こした神戸出身の河岡義裕教授@日本学術会議

必読。鳥インフルエンザウイルスの機能獲得実験で有名な河岡義裕教授のラボが、事故を起こしたのにそれをすぐ報告しなかった事件を詳述。河岡教授は日本学術会議の会員。この研究者としてあるまじき行動について、学術会議は何らかのアクションをとるべきではなか。https://t.co/nPzq0bV3FV

— Hideki Kakeya, Dr.Eng. (@hkakeya) April 11, 2023

 

Lab-created bird flu virus accident shows lax oversight of risky 'gain of function' research

The story of how the H5N1 viruses came to be created – and the response to a 2019 safety breach – raises uncomfortable questions about the tremendous trust the world is placing in research labs.

'Gain of function' research created controversial flu viruses

And yet in late 2011 the world learned that two scientific teams – one in Wisconsin, led by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka, and another in the Netherlands, led by virologist Ron Fouchier – had potentially pushed the virus in that direction. Each of these labs had created H5N1 viruses that had gained the ability to spread through the air between ferrets, the animal model used to study how flu viruses might behave in humans.

The ultimate goal of this work was to help protect the world from future pandemics, and the research was supported with words and funding by two of the most prominent scientists in the United States: Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Kawaoka contended it would be “irresponsible not to study” how the virus might evolve in nature. “Some people have argued that the risks of such studies – misuse and accidental release, for example – outweigh the benefits. I counter that H5N1 viruses circulating in nature already pose a threat,” he said at the time.

'Miscommunication' over quarantine alarmed NIH a decade ago

In 2013, six years before the 2019 safety incident with the ferret experiment at Kawaoka’s lab in Wisconsin, another member of his research team accidentally pierced their finger with a needle that had an engineered H5N1 virus on it.

It was a moment of poor judgment, human error around 6:30 p.m. Nov. 16, 2013, that set off a series of emergency calls that would eventually raise concerns in the nation’s capital.

An expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told officials at Wisconsin’s state health department that while the likelihood the scientist would develop symptoms of H5N1 was “low,” the needlestick “should be considered a serious exposure” and treated aggressively. The chief medical officer at the Wisconsin Department of Health Services told the university that the researcher would need to quarantine for seven days and take a treatment-level dose of Tamiflu twice a day for 10 days.

Six months earlier, while seeking funding and approval for the controversial experiments, Kawaoka had assured officials at the National Institutes of Health that the university had a designated quarantine apartment.

But it turned out that wasn’t the case.

So lab officials told the researcher’s family to pack up their belongings and go to a hotel. And the injured researcher was sent to quarantine at home.

Officials in the NIH office responsible for overseeing research with engineered organisms were alarmed to learn that the university didn’t have a dedicated quarantine facility for such emergencies.

“This policy is not what was communicated to us in Dr. Kawaoka’s application to perform research with mammalian transmissible strains of H5N1,” wrote Dr. Jacqueline Corrigan-Curay, acting director of the NIH Office of Biotechnology Activities, in a letter to the university.

A researcher’s home, the NIH told the university, was not an appropriate quarantine site for Kawaoka’s high-risk studies because influenza viruses can be transmissible through the air, and many residences are in high-occupancy buildings, like apartments, that share air exchange and other infrastructure.

Trying to provide an explanation, university officials told NIH there had been a “miscommunication” between Kawaoka and the university’s administration. Wisconsin officials noted that the needlestick was not expected to put the researcher at high risk of infection, and that this engineered virus “was determined not to be a mammalian-transmissible strain.”

The scientist with the needlestick completed quarantine without showing symptoms or becoming ill.

But even if a high-risk incident occurred with a more dangerous strain, UW officials told the NIH, the lab worker would still be quarantined at home.

It was a stunning change by the university to a critical safeguard that federal officials thought was in place for the Kawaoka lab’s research. The NIH demanded the university find a dedicated quarantine facility outside of workers’ residences, such as a hospital isolation room, or face the suspension or termination of its grant funding, correspondence shows.

The university didn’t want to use the UW Hospital as a quarantine site.

Their concerns included that researchers might be unwilling to come forward about potential exposures if they faced being confined in hospital isolation rooms. The university and its medical team also worried about the increased potential for the public to learn about its lab accidents, noting in correspondence that “it would be much harder to control the spread of information and as a result there would be a higher probability of incorrect information being told to (the) general public and potentially members of the media.”

The university eventually agreed to NIH’s demands. And on Dec. 24, 2013, the NIH gave its approval for Kawaoka’s lab to resume its research manipulating H5N1 virus strains that were transmissible to mammals.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2023/04/11/lab-leak-accident-h-5-n-1-virus-avian-flu-experiment/11354399002/

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