Western Hypocrisy on Intellectual Monopolies

There is currently a huge bun-fight going on at the WHO over who has the "rights" to "own" key genomic information about pandemic influenza viruses. This is tantamount to arguing over who has the rights to hire out deckchairs on the Titanic as it goes down: the idea that intellectual monopolies have any meaning in a world threatened by hundreds of millions of deaths from a new pandemic strain is beyond obscene.

What makes this spectacle particularly disgusting is the hypocrisy of the West: not content with trying to patent the unpatentable, it wants the developing countries to give up *their* "rights" so that the West's industries can maximise their profit (failing to notice that it is hard to spend all this luvverly profit when you and/or your bankers are dead). Here are some of the sordid details:

Several delegates participating in last week's Intergovernmental Meeting on Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (IGM) (under the World Health Organisation) from countries providing influenza viruses to laboratories and manufacturers in developed countries, privately mentioned that the positions taken by developed countries in particular by the US, Japan and the EU on issues such as intellectual property rights and benefit sharing reveals the "double standards" of those countries.

On the one hand, the IGM saw the US, Japan and the EU pushing hard for relinquishment of sovereign rights, an interpretation of the International Health Regulations that obligates the sharing of viruses, text that requires countries to share as "all, as feasible, cases of H5N1 and other influenza viruses with human pandemic potential" with their laboratories in the name of global public health and pandemic preparedness.

However, on the other hand, they appear unwilling to commit in particular their manufacturers and researchers that receive biological materials to any concrete benefit sharing scheme, or to address IP issues in a manner that benefits developing countries' public health and pandemic preparedness. Much of the framework's text that deals with benefit sharing continues to remain in brackets, denoting there is no agreement.

Whenever reference to "manufacturers" and the need to have a better understanding of their roles and responsibilities was made by developing countries at the meeting, the issue was quickly passed over by the Chair of the IGM, Jane Halton from Australia. And countries such as Japan and the US insisted that the framework being developed should not dictate what the manufacturers or the researchers can do with the biological materials, or their roles and responsibilities.

You would have thought that against the background of a financial system brought to its knees by blind greed, at least here at the World *Health* Organisation there would be a more, er, healthy and mature attitude to saving the world from a potentially even greater disaster. Apparently not....

Will Lack of Open Access Wipe Out the World?

A few months ago, I asked whether lack of open access to avian 'flu data might hinder our ability to head off a pandemic; now it looks like lack of open access could lead to the destruction of civilisation as we know it. If that sounds a little far fetched, consider the facts.

The US is the largest single polluter in terms of carbon dioxide: according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, "In 1997, the United States emitted about one-fifth of total global greenhouse gases."

The EPA plays a key role in determining the US's environmental actions: "the Agency works to assess environmental conditions and to identify, understand, and solve current and future environmental problems; integrate the work of scientific partners such as nations, private sector organizations, academia and other agencies; and provide leadership in addressing emerging environmental issues and in advancing the science and technology of risk assessment and risk management."

To "assess environmental conditions and to identify, understand, and solve current and future environmental problems; integrate the work of scientific partners such as nations, private sector organizations, academia and other agencies" clearly requires information. Much of that information comes from scientific journals published around the world. Unfortunately, the EPA is in the process of cutting back on journal subscriptions:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is sharply reducing the number of technical journals and environmental publications to which its employees will have online access, according to agency e-mails released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). This loss of online access compounds the effect of agency library closures, meaning that affected employees may not have access to either a hard copy or an electronic version of publications.

...

In addition to technical journals, EPA is also canceling its subscriptions to widely-read environmental news reports, such as Greenwire, The Clean Air Report and The Superfund Report, which summarize and synthesize breaking events and trends inside industry, government and academia. Greenwire, for example, recorded more than 125,000 hits from EPA staff last year.

As a result of these cuts, agency scientists and other technical specialists will no longer have ready access to materials that keep them abreast of developments within their fields. Moreover, enforcement staff, investigators and other professionals will have a harder time tracking new developments affecting their cases and projects.

So, we have the organisation whose job is to help determine the actions of the world's worst polluter cut off from much of the most recent and relevant research, in part because much of it is not open access.

No OA, no tomorrow, no comment. (Via Open Access News.)

Will Data Hoarding Cost 150 Million Lives?

The only thing separating mankind from a pandemic that could kill 150 million people are a few changes in the RNA of the H5N1 avian 'flu virus. Those changes would make it easier for the virus to infect and pass between humans, rather than birds. Research into the causes of the high death-rate among those infected by the Spanish 'flu - which killed between 50 and 100 million people in 1918 and 1919, even though the world population was far lower then than now - shows that it was similar changes in a virus otherwise harmless to humans that made the Spanish 'flu so lethal.

The good news is that with modern sequencing technologies it is possible to track those changes as they happen, and to use this information to start preparing vaccines that are most likely to be effective against any eventual pandemic virus. As one recent paper on the subject put it:

monitoring of the sequences of viruses isolated in instances of bird-to-human transmission for genetic changes in key regions may enable us to track viruses years before they develop the capacity to replicate with high efficiency in humans.

The bad news is that most of those vital sequences are being kept hidden away by the various national laboratories that produce them. As a result, thousands of scientists outside those organisations do not have the full picture of how the H5N1 virus is evolving, medical communities cannot plan properly for a pandemic, and drug companies are hamstrung in their efforts to develop effective vaccines.

The apparent reason for the hoarding - because some scientists want to be able to publish their results in slow-moving printed journals first so as to be sure that they are accorded full credit by their peers - beggars belief against a background of growing pandemic peril. Open access to data never looked more imperative.

Although the calls to release this vital data are gradually becoming more insistent, they still seem to be falling on deaf ears. One scientist who has been pointing out longer than most the folly of the current situation is the respected researcher Harry Niman. He has had a distinguised career in the field of viral genomics, and is the founder of the company Recombinomics.

The news section of this site has long been the best place to find out about the latest developments in the field of avian 'flu. This is for three reasons: Niman's deep knowledge of the subject, his meticulous scouring of otherwise-neglected sources to find out the real story behind the news, and - perhaps just as important - his refusal meekly to tow the line that everything is under control. For example, he has emphasised that the increasing number of infection clusters indicates that human-to-human transmission is now happening routinely, in flat contradiction to the official analysis of the situation.

More recently, he has pointed out that the US decision to base its vaccine on a strain of avian 'flu found in Indonesia is likely to be a waste of time, since the most probable pandemic candidate has evolved away from this.

The US Government's choice is particularly worrying because human cases of avian 'flu in North America may be imminent. In another of Niman's characteristically forthright analyses, he suggests that there is strong evidence that H5N1 is already present in North America:

Recombinomics is issuing a warning based on the identification of American sequences in the Qinghai strain of H5N1 isolated in Astrakhan, Russia. The presence of the America sequences in recent isolates in Astrakhan indicates H5N1 has already migrated to North America. The levels of H5N1 in indigenous species will be supplemented by new sequences migrating into North America in the upcoming months.

Niman arrived at this conclusion by tracking the genomic changes in the virus as it travelled around the globe with migrating birds, using some of the few viral sequences that have been released.

Let's hope for the sake of everyone that WHO and the other relevant organisations see the light and start making all the genomic data available. This would allow Niman and his many able colleagues to monitor even the tiniest changes, so that the world can be alerted at the earliest possible moment to the start of a pandemic that may be closer than many think.

Update: In an editorial, Nature is now calling for open access to all this genomic data. Unfortunately, the editorial is not open access....