Questions About Bird Flu Research Swirl Around Private WHO Meeting

"A closed-door meeting to discuss controversial bird flu research is drawing to a close at the World Health Organization in Geneva, and the WHO plans to publicly report on what happened once it's officially over.

"'We're very aware that there's a lot of interest in the meeting and that people will want to know, you know, what were the issues that were discussed and did you come to any consensus,' the WHO's Keiji Fukuda noted before the meeting began. 'So we will try to make that as clear as possible as quickly as possible.'"

"The international gathering comes as the scientific community is divided about the risks and benefits of experiments that generated genetically altered bird flu viruses."