Family Tragedy Spotlights Flu Mutations

According to this article, the strain of avian influenza that killed seven family members in Indonesia was the first in which the World Health Organization (WHO) has admitted that human-to-human transmission was the most likely cause of the spread of the virus. According to confidential sequence data presented at a closed meeting of international experts in June, the virus was accumulating mutations as it spread from person to person; a finding that reiterates the need for sequence data to be made more readily available.

Researchers argue that in order to better understand the bird flu virus, it is important to know how the virus is changing as it spreads and that the continued withholding of genetic data is hampering the study of the virus. Currently, access to the sequence data from the Indonesian cluster is restricted to a small network of researchers linked to the WHO and the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

According to the article, the WHO has not shared data samples with other researchers because this avian flu data belongs to Indonesia. A senior official at the WHO acknowledges that data sharing would lead to a better understanding of the virus, however, the WHO has not formally asked Indonesia to share the sequences.