Flu Stories: The Witholding of Flu Viral Sequences
Filters Into Mass Media

post from Daily Kos on 14 July 2006 08:05:55 AM. © Daily Kos

Welcome to Science Friday. There are other important things going on in the world, but the H5N1 issue continues to simmer in the background. Speaking of background, here are some Daily Kos stories laying out the tale, including from March 2006: H5N1: Liberate The Sequences! Free The Researchers!

From Nicholas Zamiska, WSJ:
Scientists around the world, racing to discover how avian influenza is spreading and whether it is evolving toward a pandemic strain, face a dilemma: Should they share their interim findings widely, show them only to a select set of peers, or keep them to themselves until they can publish papers, often critical to their careers?

The guilty parties here are WHO and our own CDC (but not NIH or NAMRU, an infectious disease surveillance branch of the US Navy). In fact, US House members led by

Dennis Kucinich (Democrat, Ohio) and Wayne Gilchrest (Republican, Maryland are circulating a letter in the House of Representatives that calls on Michael Levitt, the US health secretary, to require H5N1 sequences and other publicly funded research data "to be promptly deposited in a publicly accessible database, such as GenBank".
The letter has now been sent, signed by 16 members of Congress: you can read it here.

and either thank them or encourage them here. But the heat's being turned up. The prestigious journal Nature continues to lead the way (here's a summary and commentary from Effect Measure for those without a subscription.

Virus isolates from six of the eight family members have been sequenced, but the WHO has not released the data, saying that they belong to Indonesia. Instead, the agency released a statement on 23 May stating that there was "no evidence of genetic reassortment with human or pig influenza viruses and no evidence of significant mutations".
Nature has now obtained more detail on the genetic changes, which suggest that although the WHO statement was not incorrect, plenty more could have been said. Viruses from five of the cases had between one and four mutations each compared with the sequence shared by most of the strains. In the case of the father who is thought to have caught the virus from his son -- a second-generation spread -- there were twenty-one mutations across seven of the eight flu genes. This suggests that the virus was evolving rapidly as it spread from person to person.

Did you know TIME has a health blog? Yesterday, they covered the story in a post called Secret Sequences:

When H5N1 avian influenza hit a family in rural Indonesia in May, killing seven of eight people infected, it marked the most serious known incidence of human-to-human transmission of the virus.

More about this on the flip.