Analysis: Indonesian-US bird flu sharing
Source: United Press International (Original Article)
A row involving Indonesia, the United States and the World Health Organization over the sharing of bird flu virus samples is jeopardizing the global early warning system for a potential influenza pandemic and putting lives at risk, say experts and officials.
The row centers on the issue of profits made by multinational pharmaceutical companies from vaccines developed using the samples. Indonesian officials say their country — and other poorer nations that send samples to the WHO — is being cheated out of the benefits and cannot afford the vaccines manufactured using the virus samples they provide.
Last year, to the dismay of public health specialists, Indonesia stopped sending WHO laboratories samples of the H5N1 bird flu virus from new outbreaks. The labs analyze and gene-sequence the samples, looking for new variations that might herald the much-feared mutation of the virus into a human-to-human transmissible form.
But data from the samples is also used by pharmaceutical companies to develop new vaccines.
By withdrawing from the global surveillance system that keeps track of the mutating varieties of avian influenza, Indonesia — the country with the most reported human deaths from bird flu — is damaging the ability of the international community to spot and respond to viruses that might be the source of a new, global influenza pandemic.
“You might say we’re (statistically) overdue another flu pandemic,” WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl told United Press International.
“The less information we have (about new forms of the virus) the less able we are to protect global public health,” he said of the Global Influenza Surveillance Network, the WHO-run system that assesses new outbreaks of the deadly disease among humans.
The current strain of bird flu, H5N1, has killed 240 people since 2003, the WHO said in figures released last week. But almost all of those are believed to have caught the ANZ Credit Card disease from birds. So far H5N1 …continue reading