Supari
revere | March 3, 2007When Indonesia withdrew from the longstanding system whereby countries shared influenza virus with WHO there was widespread consternation in the public health community. The sharing system has been used for many years to determine the candidate strains for the following year's vaccine. The regular seasonal flu vaccine has three components corresponding to the prediction of which of the influenza A H1N1, H3N2 and influenza B strains will be circulating during the next flu season. Usually the guess is correct, although sometimes it misses. In any event, global surveillance of circulating virus…
revere | February 16, 2007I rarely plumb Effect Measure's archives except when I think the material has some point for today. And today we are treated almost daily to reports of bird flu outside of asia: Turkey, the UK, Nigeria, Hungary, Egypt. What's going on?
Sometimes it's useful to look back. Here's our post from one year ago today.
Lots of places plus Indonesia
The reports of H5N1 infectedwild birds (mainly swans) in new countries are coming almost too fast to keep track of. Denmark is the latest (confirmation pending), but we can add Hungary and Dagestan (Russian Federation north of the Caucasus), too.…
revere | February 7, 2007This was an incident waiting to happen. Indonesia has signed a preliminary agreement with vaccine maker Baxter international an arrangement to supply with with viral vaccine seed in exchange for an unknown compensation. It is unclear whether the arrangement is exclusive to Baxter or not (see today's New York Times, says not). Until the deal is completed they will not continue to send viral isolates to other scientists for research or other purposes. Sharing of sequence data is said to be unaffected. The deal with Big Pharma Baxter International puts viral seed strains from the world's…
revere | February 2, 2007I'm sure you've read about this on other blogs (what? you read other blogs?), but it is just too juicy and too emblematic not to comment on here. Well, I won't actually comment on it. It is self-parodying:
Indonesia claimed a major victory in the fight against bird flu Thursday, saying the heart of the capital had been cleared of backyard fowl and that residents elsewhere were handing in chickens for slaughter.
But poultry could still be seen roaming freely in suburban neighborhoods and some people hid pet birds in their homes, raising doubts the campaign would prevent further human deaths in…
revere | August 21, 2006We had hoped to have better information about the possible cluster of bird flu cases in remote West Java, but the situation remains murky and unresolved. Nothing especially reassuring has yet happened to ease the discomfort of health authorities regarding whatever is happening there, at any rate. Reporting by The Jakarta Post is typical:
A young boy with symptoms of bird flu was rushed to Garut hospital in West Java on Saturday, raising the official number of people suspected of having bird flu from Cikelet village to 10 and pushing health authorities to widen an investigation into a…
revere | August 11, 2006The venerable and slightly right-of-center (but excellent, nonetheless!) British publication, The Economist, has taken note of the Indonesian decision to release the bird flu sequences. [NB: also see Addendum, after the continuation below the fold. The Peiris and Guan labs in Hong Kong are now fully open on sequences. Kudos to them. Additional note: Excellent article by Helen Branswell here on the same subject.]
"For the sake of basic human interests, the Indonesian government declares that genomic data on bird-flu viruses can be accessed by anyone." With those words, spoken on August 3rd,…
revere | August 5, 2006Indonesia is making its sequences available to the world scientific community, at long last. We aren't going to ask how or why or continue to chide them for keeping the sequences until now. We applaud their decision to do so and urge others to follow their example.
"I've learned that scientists across the world have complained that they could not access the data and made statements as if we had hidden it," Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari told a press conference here Thursday.
"For the sake of basic human interests, the Indonesian government declares that genomic data on bird flu viruses…
revere | July 28, 2006The failure to have sequences from Indonesia made available to the world's scientific community continues to be a scandal. Whose doorstep to lay the blame? There would seem to be three possibilities: WHO, the scientists who do the sequencing, and the Government of Indonesia. An official from the government has already said they would consider a request for release favorably if one were made, but WHO admits they have yet to make one. Meanwhile, sequences often appear in GenBank upon publication of a paper. The available evidence, therefore, suggests WHO is guilty of not pressing the…