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Export controls designed to restrict international trade in weapons are keeping scientists from sharing their research on the bird flu virus.
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Cholera has killed nearly 7,000 Haitians since October 2010 and sickened well over a half-million. A program to vaccinate 100,000 Haitians was supposed to have kicked off by now — before the spring rains once again help spread the disease. But the campaign is bogged down in red tape.
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An expert committee that advises the government is once again going to review some controversial studies on bird flu to see if they can be published openly. Last year, those experts said no, because of concerns that the work could be misused and was too dangerous, but the government asked it to reconsider after a World Health Organization panel came to the opposite conclusion.
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The studies in question looked at how the bird flu virus could spread through the air. An expert panel that advises the government on biosafety in research had earlier said the findings should not be published, fearing that the data could fall into the wrong hands.
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Scientists working with bird flu recently called a 60-day halt on some controversial experiments. The unusual move has been compared to a famous moratorium on genetic engineering in the 1970s. Key scientists involved in that pause on genetic research disagree on whether today's furor over bird flu is history repeating itself.