On appil 27th, after much toing and froing, the Dutch government gave Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam permission to submit his paper on bird flu to Science. Dr Fouchier is the head of one of two groups studying how bird flu might become transmissible between people. In December the authorities in America and the Netherlands prevented both his group and the other, led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, from publishing their findings, lest they get into the wrong hands. This official fear stemmed from the deadly nature of bird flu. Of the 602 human cases reported since 2003, 355 have been fatal. The factor that has stopped the death toll being worse is that people have to catch the virus directly from a bird (usually a chicken). It rarely, if ever, passes from one person to another.
展开▼
