This is part II of a two-part story on the Spanish flu virus. Read part I here.
The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the apex organisation in the U.S. on matters of public health and safety. Research on any new infectious agent must be first approved by the CDC. But in 2005, the CDC received an application for study on a very old infectious agent.
The researchers in question wanted the body’s approval to recreate a deadly pathogen – one that had not infected anyone since 1920. Despite the serious risk to the public, the CDC scientists carefully reviewed the application and granted permission to perform the requisite experiments necessary, because they deemed the experiments the researchers had proposed to be sufficiently important.
