'Sovereignty' That Risks Global Health

Tag : How to Make Bird Seed


Heres a concept youve probably never heard of: viralsovereignty. This extremely dangerous idea comes to us courtesy ofIndonesias minister of health, Siti Fadilah Supari, who assertsthat deadly viruses are the sovereign property of individualnationseven though they cross borders and could pose a pandemicthreat to all the peoples of the world. So far viral sovereigntyhas been noted almost exclusively by health experts. Politicalleaders around the world should take noteand take very strongaction.
The vast majority of repeated avian flu outbreaks the past fouryears, in both humans and poultry, have occurred in Indonesia. Atleast 53 types of H5N1 bird flu viruses have appeared in chickensand people there, the World Health Organization has reported.
Yet, since 2005, Indonesia has shared with the WHO samples fromonly two of the more than 135 people known to have been infectedwith H5N1 (110 of whom have died). Worse, Indonesia is no longerproviding the WHO with timely notification of bird flu outbreaks orhuman cases. Since 2007, its government has openly defiedInternational Health Regulations and a host of other WHO agreementsto which Indonesia is a signatory.
Moreover, the Indonesian government is threatening to close downU.S. Naval Medical Research Unit Two (NAMRU-2), a public healthlaboratory staffed by Indonesians and U.S. military scientists.NAMRU-2 is one of the worlds best disease surveillance facilities,and it provides health officials worldwide with vital, transparentinformation. The Indonesian government has accused NAMRU-2scientists of everything from profiteering off its sovereignviruses to manufacturing the H5N1 bird flu in an alleged biologicalwarfare scheme. There is no evidence to support these outlandishclaims.
A year ago, Suparis assertions about viral sovereignty seemed tobe odd yet individual views. Disturbingly, however, the notion hasmorphed into a global movement, fueled by self-destructive,anti-Western sentiments. In May, Indian Health Minister A. Ramadossendorsed the concept in a dispute with Bangladesh. The Non-AlignedMovementa 112-nation organization that is a survivor of the ColdWar erahas agreed to consider formally endorsing the concept ofviral sovereignty at its November meeting.
Indonesia argues that a nations right to control all informationon locally discovered viruses should be protected through the samemechanisms that the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization uses toguarantee poor countries rights of ownership and patents on theseeds of its indigenous plants. Under the FAO seed accord, a nationcan register plants, share their seeds and derive profits fromproducts made from the botanicals. This useful policy reducesexploitative practices that sometimes enable multinationalcorporations and wealthy governments to obtain outrageous profitsfrom indigenous agriculture.
It is dangerous folly, however, to extend this policy to viruses.If the concept of viral sovereignty had been applied to AIDS 25years ago, we would not have central repositories of thousands ofvarieties of HIV today; these allow scientists to test drugs andvaccines against all the different strains of the AIDS virus. It iseven more ludicrous to extend the sovereignty notion to virusesthat, like flu, can be carried across international borders bymigratory birds.
In this age of globalization, failure to make viral samplesopen-source risks allowing the emergence of a new strain ofinfluenza that could go unnoticed until it is capable of exactingthe sort of toll taken by the pandemic that killed tens of millionsin 1918. As the world learned with the emergence of severe acuterespiratory syndrome (SARS) -- which first appeared in China in2002 but was not reported by Chinese officials until it spread tofour other nationsglobally shared health risk demands absoluteglobal transparency.
There is strong evidence from a variety of sources that forms ofthe bird flu virus circulating in Indonesia are more virulent thanthose elsewhere and in a few cases may have spread directly fromone person to another. The WHO has tried for two years toaccommodate Indonesia, without success. Under pressure fromscientists worldwide, Indonesia agreed in June to share geneticdata on some of its viral samples but not the actual microbes.Without access to the viruses, it is impossible to verify theaccuracy of such genetic information or to make vaccines againstthe deadly microbes.
Outrageously, Supari has charged that the WHO would give anyvirusesnot just H5N1 -- to drug companies, which in turn wouldmake products designed to sicken poor people, in order to prolongtheir profitable business by selling new vaccines (a charge oddlyreminiscent of the plot of John le Carr