Indonesia to share avian flu info

But even its own scientists say an interim system rushed out by the global body in January was substandard.

“There are terrible problems with the WHO tracking system,” one researcher from a WHO collaborating center wrote in an e-mail seen by The Associated Press days after its launch. “We are struggling to correct even the most obvious errors.”

Ultimately, the success of the GISAID database will depend on how widely it is embraced by the global community.

It has already landed the biggest coup with Indonesia — whose controversial health minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, became an unlikely hero in the bird flu fight when in January 2007 she decided to buck WHO’s 50-year-old virus sharing system, which obliged member countries to submit bird flu samples and data to the global body, saying it was unfair to developing countries.

She said she was worried pharmaceuticals with access to WHO’s “secret database” would use Indonesia’s virus strains to develop costly vaccines that would ultimately be inaccessible to her own people. Even the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, acknowledged she had a point.

But her decision to withhold virus samples and data from the global body for more than a year triggered a firestorm among international health experts. By making it impossible to see if her country’s virus strain was mutating, they said, she could be endangering the planet.

“We have always promoted the sharing of influenza data, all we ask for is that it be done in a fair, transparent and equitable manner,” Supari said in explaining her decision to hand over DNA sequencing data for both humans and animals to the new, online site.

“We’ll start immediately inputting the new cases,” she said.

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