Hong Kong slaughtered 17,000 birds last month, not in preparation for Christmas but because a single chicken at the Cheung Sha Wan wholesale market had tested positive for bird flu.

The precaution was not overblown; in 1997, the island's authorities killed 1.5 million birds during the first outbreak of avian flu, a bug which went on to infect 600 people worldwide, killing 360, a 60 per cent mortality rate.

By contrast, the global swine flu outbreak in 2009 killed just 10 per cent of those infected.

The only good thing about the avian, H5N1, strain of influenza was that you could only catch it from direct contact with infected birds.

Up to now.

Scientists in The Netherlands have mutated the bug in the laboratory so that it can be transmitted through the air, like the much less deadly, but far more contagious, seasonal flu.

The result is a virulent infection so lethal that the Daily Mail in London called it the "Armageddon Virus".

The development has caused a storm among anti-terrorist authorities in the US, who fear that publication of a scientific paper on the technique could serve as a recipe for cooking up a bio-war weapon of mass destruction.

The US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity has asked the team that did the work not to publish all the details of how they did it.

The editors of scientific journals Science and Nature are considering whether to agree to government requests that the research be censored.

Bruce Alberts, the editor-in-chief of Science, said "Science editors will be evaluating how best to proceed," adding that they were taking seriously a request that they publish only an abbreviated report.

"At the same time, however, Science has concerns about withholding potentially important public health information from responsible influenza researchers," he said.

Other scientists were unhappy with the principle of security agencies dictating which research could be published. "It is a very worrying idea that information from this type of work may be restricted to those who 'qualify' in some way to be allowed to share it," said Professor Wendy Barclay, who holds the chair in influenza virology at Imperial College London.

"In the end, is the likelihood of misuse outweighed by the danger of beginning a Big Brother society?"

This is not the first time that security chiefs in the West have been alarmed by virus research.

In 2005, they almost stopped a paper describing how scientists had managed to resurrect the Spanish flu bug, which is blamed for killing an estimated 50 million people in 1918, more than died in the entire First World War.

The latest work was orchestrated by Dr Ron Fouchier, a virologist at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, but not through the much-feared technique of genetic engineering.

Instead, Dr Fouchier and his colleagues ran generations of the bug through ferrets, which are often used for flu research because the disease affects them in much the same way it does humans.

The research is part of worldwide efforts to cut the time it takes to develop vaccines against the constantly evolving influenza bug.

Some scientists had argued that bird flu could never become as virulent as the H1, H2 or H3 viruses, but Dr Fouchier's research has proved them wrong.

"In a laboratory, it was possible to change the H5N1 into a virus... that can easily be spread through the air," he said. "This process could also happen naturally."

Since it is clearly possible that H5N1 could evolve into an airborne strain all by itself, doing the anti-viral and vaccine research in advance could save millions of lives.

So, suppressing the scientific results could protect humanity from a man-made threat, while leaving it vulnerable to a natural enemy.

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