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GENEVA, Sat. --- The United Nations health agency says it would like to make public a confidential database it maintains on bird flu research, but that it is up to countries and scientists to agree on sharing their information. The password-protected database, details of which were first reported on earlier this month in articles by the journal Science and The Wall Street Journal, was created in 2003 at the request of Southeast Asian countries first hit by the deadly H51 strain of bird flu, said Dick Thompson, spokesman for infectious diseases at the World Health Organization. WHO had been urging countries and researchers to allow genetic sequences of the virus stored in the database to be made available publicly, but countries and scientists had so far resisted, Thompson said. |
“It’s been several months since we’ve been saying that access to this information should not be restricted”, he said. “But these are not our viruses and this isn’t our information”. He declined to name which countries were most opposed or elaborate on why they were concerned about the information becoming freely accessible. WHO has organized a massive campaign to raise international awareness of bird flu and unite health officials, pharmaceutical companies and politicians to prepare countries to fight the disease in case it sparks a human flu pandemic. The organization also has urged countries to share samples of potential |
bird flu specimens with international health authorities. But recently its own transparency has come under scrutiny as some suggested it was withholding information necessary for other researchers to contribute to bird flu efforts. The database contained some 2,300 genetic sequences of the H5N1 virus, about a third of the global total held by laboratories and research institutes, Thompson said. WHO has no estimates for how many people have access, but it is available to countries which have donated sequences and where the health body’s collaborating centres are located. Scientists contributing sequences are also privy to the online bank. --- AP. |
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