WHO
revere | September 6, 2006With all the talk of transparency, we learn that China has yet to share its avian flu isolates with the world scientific community. This is different than the sequence issue. China has shared its sequences, but the sequences don't tell the whole story. In particular, we are still not able to make the jump to biology, for example host range, virulence and tissue tropisms. Correlating the sequences with the biology is a critical scientific goal. For that you need the viruses themselves. And since 2004 the Ministry of Agriculture, despite promises to the contrary, has not shared its isolates.…
revere | July 17, 2006An interesting Commentary on the problem of releasing the flu sequences has been posted on the blog Anthropologique by its proprietor, J. F. Brinkworth. I disagree with it, but he makes some pertinent points.
Brinkworth believes WHO is not at fault for failure to release the Indonesian sequences and he provides some information of which I, and probably most others, are not aware:
Indonesia has very, very stringent nucleic sequence I.P. laws. All genetic material recovered there is their property. Their Convention of Biological Dviersity Law No.5 (1994) and Cultural Practices Law No. 12 (1992…
revere | July 13, 2006Declan Butler, senior correspondent at Nature, has a particularly infuriating news article today, infuriating because of the attitude it reveals from WHO, CDC and the Indonesian government about releasing information about influenza they alone are privy to. The main points of the article revealing more details of the genetic sequences of the large Indonesian cluster of eight related people in Karo, Sumatra in Indonesia have been known for at least a month, although never publicly released before Butler's article. Presumably he obtained the information from the same sources we and others did.…
revere | July 1, 2006Influenza is a seasonal disease. Some seasons are worse than others. In some locations they can be even more deadly than 1918 pandemic influenza (see post here). What characteristic, then, distinguishes a pandemic outbreak from "regular" seasonal influenza if it is not severity?
Severity is, on average, a characteristic of pandemic strain outbreaks because it involves a virus to which the general population has no or little previous immunity. There is another feature of pandemic outbreaks of importance: age distribution. Limited but fairly reliable evidence indicates that pandemic outbreaks…
revere | June 30, 2006The momentum is building to release the sequestered flu sequence data. The prestigious scientific journal Nature today published a strongly worded editorial, excerpts of which you can read Nature senior correspondent Declan Butler's blog:
Indonesia has become the hot spot of avian flu, with the virus spreading quickly in animal populations, and human cases occurring more often there than elsewhere. Yet from 51 reported human cases so far -- 39 of them fatal -- the genetic sequence of only one flu virus strain has been deposited in GenBank, the publicly accessible database for such information…
revere | June 23, 2006Indonesia registered its 51st official case and 39th death this week, a 13 year Jakarta boy who had helped his grandfather slaughter sick chickens, took sick a week later and was dead less than a week after that. There's more discouraging news from this benighted bird flu hotspot.
The Indonesian Ministry of Health says the people in the village where the large family cluster with human to human transmission have refused to be tested or have their chickens tested. WHO has been saying repeatedly that there is no evidence of infection beyond blood relations in this cluster (Jakarta Post). If…
revere | June 22, 2006The latest chapter in the Chinese Disease Cover-up Follies involves a just published report in the New England Journal of Medicine by eight Chinese doctors reporting the genetic sequences of an H5N1 case that occurred in November of 2003. Old news. Except China didn't officially report its first case until two years later, November 2005. Just as the first issues of the journal were reaching NEJM's subscribers, were notified that one or more of the authors wished to withdraw the paper. Too bad. Too late.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization is expressing shock at the reporting lapse and…
revere | June 19, 2006I've spent some time here (old site, here, here, here, here and here) explaining WHO's place in the international system. It explains certain things I thought important to understand.
An important part of the international "system" (Westphalian-style) is there is no official authority over sovereign nation states. That means that power politics operates, sometimes quietly, sometimes nakedly. WHO is not immune. A shocking case in point relates to some highly questionable decisions made by the late WHO Director General, Dr. Lee Jong-wook. It is awkward to bring this up in the wake of his…