[twigs]

I echo your disquiet. The thought of this escaping the lab...

[Renegade]

" The thought of this escaping the lab."

and being genetically engineered to target only Muslims .

[Calvin Locke]

Escaping? Heck, they'll give it to a rogue regime under some pretext of "exchange of scientific information" program.

Don't you remember they were giving Saddam Hussein anthrax samples?

[Uncle Miltie]

All it would take is some "animal rights" activists storming the lab and freeing the infected mice, and we'd have a pandemic.

[chickenlips]

Relax! The lab is guarded by Osama Security, what could go wrong?

[Freedom4US]

Theoretically it is good to study, because those who might not have our best interests in mind may have already weaponized this strain in some fashion. If I had to guess, the Soviets back in the day, among others.

[MarkL]

So they recreated the 1918 strain in a lab?

And infected primates with it.

Somehow I feel a great disquiet, a distinct unease, about the prospect of a test tube somewhere labeled "1918 Influenza".

There are a number of labs here in the US, and around the world, that have some of the deadliest bacterial and viral infectious samples. Including various strains of marberg, ebola, influenza, hanta, and even smallpox, as well as botulin and anthrax. I believe that here in the US, they've got them at the NIH and USAMRID at Ft Detrick.

That was the theme behind Steven King's "The Stand," where a particularly nasty strain of influenze escapes from one of the labs.

Mark