Alarm grows as Indonesia snubs West over bird flu

Business Times 8 Sep 08;

(JAKARTA) With nearly half the world's human bird flu deaths, concern is building over Indonesia's refusal to share virus samples and its health minister's increasingly strident denunciations of global 'conspiracies'.

Indonesia stopped sharing the samples with the World Health Organisation (WHO) in December 2006 on fears pharmaceutical firms would use them to make vaccines that are too expensive for poor countries. The initial move by Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari earned international plaudits for taking on an unfair global system, but with WHO talks at an impasse, Ms Supari's increasing belligerence is raising alarm.

The minister has broadened her critique of an 'unfair, neocolonialist' global health system, raising the possibility earlier this year that the United States was using the virus to develop biological weapons in her book, It's Time for the World to Change: Divine Hands Behind Avian Influenza.

Ms Supari told a rapturous crowd at a book discussion last week that rich nations were creating 'new viruses' and sending them to developing nations in order to create markets for drug companies to sell vaccines.

'Indonesia sends a virus to the WHO but it suddenly ends up with the US government. Then the US government turns the virus into dollars and we don't know what kind of research,' she said.

'Then the virus is turned into vaccines (that are sent to) Indonesia and Indonesia has to buy them and if they don't buy them, it turns and turns again, and in the end developed countries make new viruses which are then sent to developing countries,' she said.

Bird flu scientists abroad and in Indonesia have raised concerns that while Ms Supari seeks to reshape the global order, time is being wasted in understanding a virus that could potentially kill millions if it mutates into a form transmissible between humans.

Indonesia announced in August that 112 people have died from the virus, out of more than 240 worldwide since late 2003. Only a handful of samples and genetic sequences have been shared with the WHO and researchers. The health ministry also earlier this year stopped publicly announcing bird flu deaths, only releasing information information weeks or months after victims have died. 'I'm a bit suspicious what she's doing is more politics and not in fact for the global health system,' said Ngurah Mahardika, a virologist from Udayana University on Bali island.

'This will lessen the strength, the power of the preparedness of the global system ... (withholding samples means) we don't have any epidemiological and virological signal now of what the virus looks like,' Dr Mahardika said. -- AFP