Indonesia announced yesterday that it would immediately resume sharing samples of H5N1 bird flu virus taken from infected Indonesians with the World Health Organization (WHO).
The announcement follows two days of talks in Jakarta between Indonesian officials, directors of WHO Collaborating Centres, potential sponsors (eg from the from the Asian Development Bank and the Gates Foundation), and representatives from 20 countries affected by bird flu.
The purpose of the talks was to resolve the dispute that started in December last year when Indonesia stopped sending samples taken from infected people to WHO Collaborating Centres.
The reason they did this was because they discovered some of their samples had been used by a drug company for vaccine development.
Siti Fadilah Supari, Health Minister for Indonesia, said it was unfair for drug companies to do this without seeking permission from the donor country. Her objection focused world attention on the irony of a donor country in the developing world being unable to afford vaccines that its own samples had helped to create.
The compromise agreement reached in Jakarta is that Indonesia will resume sending samples to WHO Collaborating Centres, and the WHO will not release samples from donor countries to other agencies without the permission of the donor country.
WHO Collaborating Centres use the bird flu samples to track and identify new strains of the virus and find out if it has mutated or changed in any way, for instance by acquiring human genes. This centralizing of information keeps diagnostic procedures and risk assessments up to date and also informs vaccine development.
They also test antivirals on the samples to see if they are still effective.
This week saw the confirmation that three people in Indonesia have died from bird flu, taking the country’s death toll to 69, according to Indonesian health officials. The victims were a 15-year old boy, a 22-year old woman and a 40-year old man from different parts of the country.
Also earlier this week Egyptian health officials informed the WHO of their 27th human case of the virulent form of H5N1 bird flu. The latest victim, a 3- year old girl from Aswan is in hospital and said to be in a stable condition. They think she contracted the illness from backyard poultry.
Of the 27 cases in Egypt so far, 13 people have died.
The total global number of infections confirmed to the WHO stands at 282 people of which 169 have died.
The majority of infections have been in Viet Nam (93 cases, with none reported since 2005), and the majority of deaths have been in Indonesia (63 deaths, most of them in 2006 and 2007).
Health officials and scientists across the globe are anxious to keep a close eye on the developing H5N1 situation. The virus is mutating, and the fear is that one day it will mutate into a form that allows it to pass from human to human. If that were to happen it could cause a global pandemic, which some estimates suggest will kill millions of people, with the developing world carrying most of that burden.
Written by: Catharine Paddock
Writer: Medical News Today