Indonesia, FAO, OIE pledge to publish H5N1 data
Aug 3, 2006 (CIDRAP News) – In an apparent policy shift, Indonesia promised today to freely share genetic data on H5N1 avian influenza viruses, according to a Bloomberg news report.
That announcement comes 2 days after the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) pledged to “systematically” publish avian flu virus sequences and urged others to follow suit.
The two announcements raise the prospect of better tracking of mutations in the virus, which should help in the development of vaccines to use in case the H5N1 virus evolves into a strain capable of causing a human pandemic.
Indonesia’s health minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, said the country will deposit avian flu virus data in GenBank, a public database of genetic sequences, according to today’s Bloomberg report. She said data from the recent family case cluster in Sumatra involving person-to-person transmission would be included….
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/avianflu/news/aug0306sharing.html
Oops. That post was by me. :)
Theresa42,
Thank you!
Now lets see what they do next.
The Karo sequences are crucial. They cannot be published too quickly.
Hopefully, the Indonesian government has realized that this is in their interest.
Transparency will encourage international support for the Indonesian government, people and business in their fight against the avian flu, whether it’s human, poultry or mammals.
Hopefully, other nations will follow suit - including China, Laos, Myanmar, and the WHO, the CDC with data already in their possession.
Lack of transparency will only result in distrust, which can only be bad for business.
Monotreme – at 21:40 “The Karo sequences are crucial. They cannot be published too quickly.”
That’s assuming that they are taking lots of samples. Including those from pigs.
They may have problems with compliance from villagers though. It would seem that trust is very thin on the ground in that part of Indonesia, IMHO>
anon_22 – at 22:08
I feel the main hurdles (TPTB) have been overcome. Compliance from villages may not be that hard if more carrots are offered, at relatively modest costs. It’s survival at every level of society, rich or poor, so for once I think short term self interest may take the back seat.
I recall a couple of weeks back there were (false) reports that WHO may announce phase 4 for Indonesia and the business community there was pleading the Minister of Health to lobby the WHO not to go to phase 5 which they believe will completely ruin them.
This is very welcome news. I am grateful to the Indonesian government for making the right decision with regard to release of sequences. The release of sequences should focus international scientific attention on the Indonesian viruses. I believe the release of the H5N1 virus sequence data from Indonesia will lead to many questions, which people may not be able to answer. When this becomes public, it will encourage people to search for those answers and that will be a positive outcome.
bravo !
I hope that it will turn out that it was to their own benefit
so others will follow. Also with the other disease data
and H5N1-articles and expert probability estimates.
BTW., which sequences are held by FAO,OIE ?
Wow this is great…I hope they follow thru, and look forward to hearing you scientists and other well-informed folks explain, analyse, debate the ramifications of what we learn. Thanks to all fluwikians for their hard work toward this end…in a small way it makes me feel we were heard tho it’s impossible to know how much of a difference if any fluwikie made…I kind of feel proud to be part of something that supports whats right.
Andrew,
Thank you so much for your contributions here. As someone close to the scene you have insights the rest of us can only guess about. Your contributions are invaluable.
I agree Dr. Jeremijenko. The more sequences that are released, the more questions that will be asked, with increasing urgency.
anon_22 – at 05:48
No, it’s not about power.
1. Indonesia has a deal with the U.S. and Singapore and that may include using the lab on the 7th Fleet and the research facility in a remote location on Indonesian side of Borneo. Closer relationship with the U.S. to buy more support on other things.
2. Malik Peiris alreay won his Grand Prize: recent induction into Royal Society (world renowned British academy of sciences) for his work on SARS. Now let some one else win the next grand prize. You are out of the draw pool :-)
3. Set a precedent to bypass the WHO so other countries can follow suit. WHO to become more irrelevant. Who cares about who gets the WHO DG job - what a mouthful. Cooperation with the biggest superpower pays. The Gates Foundation will hand you money. Don’t get friendlier with China via the WHO, it doesn’t pay. Money talks, always.
4. Whoever collects the samples on the ground is the gatekeeper. Now that there may not be any international referee, only Indonesia and NAMRU (is this U.S. military or civilian run?) are involved. Easier to keep secrets if need arises, even if it’s temporarily to buy time.
5. We don’t know if Margaret Chan or the WHO (and I don’t think one person alone can make such a policy decision of an international organization with an Executive Committee of many countries) favors witholding sequences. The public position has been it’s intellectual property owned by the sovereign state. WHO has been powerless. It will become more powerless.
6. The U.S. prefers bilateral diplomacy, not multilateral.
7. Don’t know if CDC favors witholding sequences either. It may be bound by the same constraints. If it releases foreign countries’ sequences, it won’t see them anymore.
I say on balance, it is a good turn of events.
Ah,DEFINITELY not enough coffee. Posted to the wrong (news) thread.
We now need to ensure that the samples at ground zero are being collected, early. That means human, poultry and pig.
Malik Peiris’ take about what needs to be done:
Great, now we all can put pressure on the other countries to make the same announcement. Maybe LANL will finally answer my request to allow the downloading of their sequence information. Wouldn’t a transparent and open scientific inquiry be a great thing. I would like Monotreme to tell you what we have in mind if he has the time.
To understand how this new arrangement works in practice, we need to understand NAMRU, I googled and found this official namru-2 site:
Interesting read.
Dude and I are working on two database projects. The first one will be to create a BLASTable database that will initially contain all H5N1 sequences from viruses isolated from humans. This is currently available from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LANL) but is very expensive ($1500/year). Dude has generously offered to donate a server for this purpose for free. He has sent two emails to LANL asking them if they object to this project. Thus far, they have failed to respond.
The second project will be be to provide a web accessible, searchable database of every human case. Examples of fields to be included in the database are: geographical location (country, province, village), age, gender, time of onset of symptoms, treatment (tamiflu, ventilator, etc.), pathology, sequences of isolated viruses, associated publications, etc. Again, the idea is that this will be free and available to anyone. Of course, many of the fields will be empty. However, I think there is enough data to make this worthwhile. And sometimes highlighting an empty field prompts those with the info to fill it ;-)
We’d be happy to get input from other Fluwikians on this project, although it occurs to me that we should probably start a separate thread on this subject once we are further along.
Bump
Closed to maintain Forum speed.