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.