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LONDON (Reuters) – British scientists are developing genetically engineered chickens designed to fully withstand the flu with a new approach to preventing a deadly pandemic in humans.
Wendy Barkley, professor of virology at Imperial College London and co-chair of the project, said that the first generation of modified chickens was to be hatched at the end of the year at the Roslyn Institute's University of Edinburgh Scotland. The idea is to produce poultry that can not be infected. Flu and constitute "an isolation between wild birds and humans".
The DNA has been modified for birds with the help of a new gene modification technique called Cresper. In this case, the "adjustments" are made to remove some of the protein that the flu virus usually depends on, making the chicken completely resistant to the flu.
Global experts in health and infectious diseases consider the risk of a human influenza pandemic as one of their main concerns.
The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 killed about 50 million people. The biggest fear right now is that a deadly strain of bird flu is being pbaded from humans through wild birds to an airborne epidemic that can easily be pbaded between humans.
"If we can prevent the flu virus from migrating wild birds to chickens, we will stop the epidemic that is causing it," Barkley said. One of the main obstacles to this approach is the concerns of poultry producers about their acceptance by the public. Of the traditional hybridization (…), but they could worry about the consumption of genetically modified food. "
Source: Reuters
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