It is tiresome to report the same story over and over again (for a few previous posts see here, here, here, here and here), but sometimes necessary. It has been widely reported -- again -- that the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture is withholding isolates of H5N1 it promised to provide. Indeed, WHO's Beijing office reports it has received no isolates since 2004.
The issue came to the scientific world's attention again last week when a team of Hong Kong and American researchers reported a new sublineage of H5N1 has become dominant in southern China and southeast asia in the last year, the first the outside world has learned of this.
Despite that prevalence, the Agriculture Ministry has not given the WHO any samples of the new strain, said Julie Hall, an infectious disease expert at the WHO's Beijing office.
"There's a stark contrast between what we're hearing from the researchers and what the Ministry of Agriculture says," Hall said in a telephone interview. "Unless the ministry tell us what's going on and shares viruses on a regular basis, we will be doing diagnostics on strains that are old."
While new strains of viruses emerge regularly, health experts need to know when one becomes dominant in order to develop methods to detect and fight the disease, said Hall. (AP)
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), also showed widespread and year long infection of poultry in southern China, although Chinese authorities only announced three outbreaks in the same area during the period of the study.
This confirms (again) that the Chinese government is not a reliable source of information about a virus that is a potential danger to everyone. We recognize the Chinese government is not a person, it is many people, and therefore doesn't speak and act with one voice. The Ministry of Health in China has a much better record than the Ministry of Agriculture, which in the past has been a notorious source of misinformation and recalcitrance. The situation is a complicated mix of personalities, internal politics, ignorance, incompetence, venality and the usual mix of bureaucratic and ideological factors. That's their business. Our business is in getting accurate and timely public health information, and authorities in China are failing to provide it.
This raises the pertinent question whether Beijing is a suitable venue for the 2008 summer olympics. The same forces that covered up the SARS epidemic until it had spread around the world are apparently still at work regarding H5N1. Indeed the stakes for China are higher with H5N1, given the economic impact on the poultry industry, the upcoming olympics and her reputation as a player in the global economic arena.
It also raises new doubts about the suitability of the Chinese government's candidate for WHO Director General, Dr. Margaret Chan. The claim she is uniquely suited to deal with the cultural and political minefield that is China at a time when that country is central to understanding the emergence of a possible influenza pandemic is contradicted by the government's behavior and lack of transparency. Chan is the WHO influenza chief (on leave while candidate for Director General). So much for her prowess in getting China's cooperation.
Provision of timely and accurate information is critical, as WHO itself notes:
According to [WHO's] Hall, the agriculture ministry last provided the WHO with virus samples from poultry in 2004 - a shocking lack of consideration for the global battle to prevent an avian-influenza pandemic, as the best source of information in a disease stemming from poultry is the birds themselves.
"This is a new disease. Nobody knows how to tackle it, nobody in the world has all the answers. But if they share ... then we will all gain from that," the International Herald Tribune quoted Hall as saying.
"The ministry needs to tell us just how many sub-strains are circulating in China and whether some strains are dominant or becoming more dominant." (UPI)
Unfortunately WHO itself has been a poor role model, having kept gene sequences in a private database at Los Alamos National Laboratory. They have recently been working to share data with the international scientific community, but their commitment to principle is suspect and with it their moral standing. What a shame.
You reap what you sow.
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We and our loved ones and communities are going to reap what they sowed.
My biggest fear is that the lady will redirect resources to China that they dont deserve. This could be everything from AIDS and Flu to vaccine research posts. SinoVac is a huge lobbyist for this and they are buying off people right and left to get her in. Talk about healthcare here, well they do just talk about it there.
It is little nips in the dam that become the big hole in it later. Hit the same rock in the same place long enough and eventually it breaks. This would ensure that China does emerge as the next superpower and the Ruskies had better watch out.
Logical thinking: We have wide spread, vaccine resistant strains of a deadly virus circulating through our domesticated poultry as well as wild birds. We need to let the world experts know so they can help us find a way to control or curtail this epidemic before it spreads into our human population and kills 300 million of our people, devastating our economy and throwing our civilization back 200 years. Illogical thinking: We have wide spread, vaccine resistant strains of a deadly virus circulating through our poultry so we better keep it a secret from the rest of the world and lie through our teeth about it so that we can still have the 2008 olympics here (if we are all still alive then) which will bring us millions of dollars in revenue from tourism (provided our multitrillion dollar economy hasn't already crashed from an uncontrollable pandemic.)
Oh well, the Chinese aren't the only people whose government leaders engage in similar shortsighted illogics...take the US's "war on terrorism" campaign in Iraq, for example.
Henry Niman's most recent post on his site about this Fujian strain controversy seems to contradict the above article's thesis. Worth looking at, for sake of argument.
Yes, there is definitely a story here, but per usual, the info reaching the public and WHO is fairly slanted, which simply creates more confusion as well as sequence hoading. The battles between Hong Kong and mainland China go back to SARS. I have first hand knowledge of these issues, but let's just say that there is disagreemnt and it is longstanding.
The Fujian strain was first reported (by Hong Kong) in a Nature paper published last year. China's Ministry of Health put out a preparedness report at the beginning of this year, which described Fujian sequneces in humans and birds. These are all public documents and are not ambiguous.
The the Fujian is not new and the spreead in China is easily demonstrated with public documents from China.
Human Fujian sequences from China (released by China) were available in the spring
http://www.recombinomics.com/News/04030602/H5N1_Anhui_Q226R.html
and the spread in China was clear
http://www.recombinomics.com/News/04050601/H5N1_Fujian_Spread_China.html
Full sequences from the human cases are stll lacking, as are bird sequences from 2005 and 2006, so the issue of sequence hoarding is quite real.
However, this hoarding extends well beyond China. Weybridge has at least 80 sequences from Europe that go back over a year and they have realeased ONE full sequneces from birds (as well as 5 human sequences).
Interestingly, Romania just released a partial sequence from 2005 and it is definitely Qinghai, but has Fujian sequences. One set of Romanian H5N1 bird sequences being hoarded by Weybridge forms a seperate branch, and I suspect the partial sequence by Romainia falls on that branch.
These data would again put a nail in the two basic tenets of influenza genetics (drift by random mutation and shift by reasortment) and virtually ALL of the consultants to WHO are standing in quicksand trying to hold up these pillars, which would be destroyed if the full set of sequences were released.
In the latest PNAS paper, there were 404 new HA sequences along with 152 PB2 sequences and ZERO sequences for the other 6 gene segments (even though the M gene was discussed in the text with regard to Amantadine sensitivity, which violates the basic understanding of peer reviewed publications that deposit of the sequences is a publication requirement - the paper lists 556 accession numbers, clearly indicating the MP sequences are not going to be public any time soon.
Although quite a few sequneces have come out in the past few months, the hoarding is still quite significant and the public should demand more. The sequences were largely generated with public funds and FULL sequences can be generated at no charge under the NIAID flu sequencing program.
These hoarded sequences will clearly show that the basic tenets of influenza genetics are nonsense, and the pandemic vaccine programs are guaranteed to fail becasue the targets are obsolete by the time the vaccine has been made.
Recombination remains the name of the game (as was CLEARLY seen in the recent sequences from mainland China as well as the PNAS paper - in spite of the withheld sequences), and the basic tenets of influenza genetic are utter nonsense.
Speaking of transparency, or lack thereof, there is a lengthy, very well researched/discussed and controversial thread at Flu wiki regarding the outbreak of mystery illness in Nepal. (go to flu wiki and click on the "Nepal" discussion.) Many of those posting data on the thread seem to fear it could be H5N1 and argue effectively against the govt's official claim that it is a form of cerebral malaria. It is beginning to look like a rather massive coverup, and WHO is involved.
On the transparancy front, I have put up a commentary showing the The WHO is hoarding more sequences in its private database than the 1000's requested from China
http://www.recombinomics.com/News/11050601/H5N1_Hoarding_WHO_China.html
Well, I think it is finally out why China has been hoarding sequences: they have been conducting research to uncover the gene in HPH5N1 that makes it so lethal, and according to an article in today's Scientific American they have succeeded. Now, they say, they can manufacture a vaccine against it (and of course hold all the patents!)
Here's the link. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=3AC01363EB96084…