Bioweapons fear over use of bird flu samples
Indonesian health minister Siti Fadillah Supari said she feared that bird flu samples sent to the World Health Organisation could be used by a US government laboratory to create biological weapons.
The minister, who recently released a book on her campaign against automatic sharing of bird flu virus samples with the WHO, also believes the virus was a blessing from God, allowing Indonesia to overturn what Dr Siti Fadillah describes as a 'colonial' approach to sharing samples of the lethal virus.
In the book, It's Time for the World To Change; Divine Hand behind Avian Influenza, Dr Siti Fadillah, a cardiologist, describes how she frequently prayed for God's help in her fight against the WHO and western drug companies.
She said this began when she realised that the organisation shared its bird flu samples gathered in Indonesia with a laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, owned by the US Energy Department, as well as major pharmaceutical companies.
'It was not improbable that there were insane people among us who could get the opportunity to abuse the result of the research for their inhumanly [sic] contentment, to create a calamity like Hiroshima or even greater,' she writes.
In the Los Alamos laboratory one or two of the scientists are from the WHO, but she alleges that the remainder are unknown, and she fears the DNA samples could be used to develop biological weapons.
She said the sequence data for 58 Indonesian viruses, which were shared with the WHO, had been transferred to a US laboratory, Bio Health Security. She asked whether this was a 'research facility for developing biological weapons under the control of the US Department of Defence'. Alternatively, she said criminal organisations could get their hands on the virus samples to develop weapons.
'It is not improbable that there will be a criminal organisation, either state or non-state, who takes advantage of the condition by creating new viruses to spread them to poor countries. That way the vaccine producers have the capability to prolong their profitable business by selling new vaccines.'
Dr Siti Fadillah has also been campaigning to overturn the WHO's 50-year practice of sharing bird flu viruses with western pharmaceutical companies which develop vaccines, which she says are too expensive for developing countries.
She said Vietnam, which was used to develop a major bird flu vaccine, was unable to afford the vaccine and protect its citizens from an outbreak of the disease in 2004.
The WHO has called on countries to stockpile stores of vaccines, but Indonesia can afford only a limited supply. Indonesia stopped sending its bird flu samples to the WHO in January last year arguing that it would withhold the virus samples until the global health body could guarantee that the country would have access to affordable vaccines in the event of a pandemic.
In the book, Dr Siti Fadillah accuses David Heymann, a senior WHO official, of denying Indonesia aid to develop laboratories and combat bird flu until it agreed to share its samples.
The WHO in Jakarta said its Indonesian representative was unable to comment.
The minister said 12 samples from recent bird flu patients were sent on Tuesday to the WHO-affiliated Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta in the United States.
