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Biosecurity News in Brief
Indonesia Sends H5N1 Samples to CDC, No Evidence of Mutation ReportedBy Jennifer Nuzzo, March 7, 2008 As reported in a March 5, 2008, CIDRAP News story, Indonesian health officials have announced that H5N1 virus samples sent by the Health Ministry to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “showed no signs of dangerous mutations.”1 According to the article, the CDC, which is part of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) flu network, received 15 H5N1 clinical samples from Indonesia on February 22, 2008. The samples were obtained from two patients who were confirmed by the WHO on February 5 and 12, 2008, to be infected with H5N1. The article states that “further details on the test results” are not available.1 The CIDRAP article points out that it is still “unclear if the recently shared samples signal that Indonesia has unilaterally ended its boycott of the international virus-sharing system,” which the country announced in December 2006.1 The recent transmission of samples to CDC represents the first time Indonesia has shared samples with the WHO network since August 2007, when it sent a single sample to the CDC “to show that an outbreak of human cases on the island of Bali did not involve a mutated strain.”2 Indonesia and the WHO have not been able to come to terms on virus sharing since their last meeting in November 2007, during which they were unable to reach agreement as to how best to ensure that developing countries have access to vaccines derived from their clinical samples.2 According to the article, Indonesia's health minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, told reporters that her country’s recent decision to send samples to the CDC was “only for risk assessment and that the organization [CDC] had to notify Indonesia if it wanted to make a [vaccine] seed virus from the samples.” Moreover, Supari maintains that Indonesia continues to retain “the rights to its viruses in the event that a pharmaceutical company wanted to make a vaccine from the virus in the samples.” References
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