Thursday 22 December 2011

Science News update- New Method of Sterlizing Hospital Wards & Virulent Bird Flu

Welcome (back) to Weirdbeautiful!

There are two major science stories online this week . The first, is a proposal to sterlize hospital rooms and even matresses with a mixture of Ozone and Hydrogen peroxide- chemicals the body itself uses to destroy (lyse) harmful organisms.  You can read the full story here-->

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/sterilising-gas-could-clean-wards-050014785.html;_ylt=AimCR.Z2w5Y0eQC4eoRQO_LbfMl_;_ylu=X3oDMTFxa3RwMG0xBG1pdANJbmZpbml0ZSBCcm93c2UgVGV4dARwb3MDNgRzZWMDTWVkaWFJbmZpbml0ZUJyb3dzZUxpc3Q-;_ylg=X3oDMTJyaHA0M2JjBGludGwDZ2IEbGFuZwNlbi1nYgRwc3RhaWQDZDg5ZTMzNDctMDY3OC0zNzc2LTkwYjUtY2RiYWEwYWEzNWRiBHBzdGNhdAN1awRwdANzdG9yeXBhZ2UEdGVzdAM-;_ylv=3

The second major story is news that the American government has pressured leading scientists not to publish full details of recent research on bird flu. The research, which was commissioned by the American government itself, investigated how (natural or -even- artificial) changes in the flu virus genome could lead to the evolution of a more infectious or virulent strain of bird flu. This knowledge could clearly be abused, so some of the more detailed information has been surpressed. The full story is on line here-->


http://finance.yahoo.com/news/details-lab-made-bird-flu-132155927.html

It surprises me a little that this story has made the headlines, because I would expect ( and, in some cases, hope) that the results of quite a few studies are not made fully public. Not that scientists have any kind of moral superiority over the rest of mankind in this matter (Fritz Haber's work on chemical weapons springs to mind), but in some cases, the intellectual problem of scientific censorship is clearly preferrable to the real problem of manmade highly virulent "superbugs".

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