Scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control have placed the genetic blueprints of about 40 H5N1 viruses isolated from human bird flu cases in Indonesia into one public access database.
They will log the huge new collection into another database as well, the director of the agency's influenza division said Monday.
The move to put the data in the public domain, giving scientists from around the world free access, came after the Indonesian government told the World Health Organization on Thursday that it was willing to share the genetic sequences of all H5N1 viruses isolated from humans there.
“We feel this is a public health problem of global proportion and that therefore it is in the best interest of global public health to have the data available for as many creative minds and well-trained minds as possible,” Dr. Nancy Cox, director of the CDC's influenza division, said in an interview.
The data show that the viruses that have infected people in Indonesia were sensitive to the flu drug oseltamivir (sold as Tamiflu), but that resistance to another class of flu drugs may be increasing in that country.
Dr. Cox said she hoped the Indonesian decision would create a domino effect, spurring other countries to agree to share the genetic sequences of H5N1 viruses they have collected.
She didn't name names. But the government of Turkey has never agreed to share the genetic codes of viruses from an outbreak in January. And China has been criticized in the past for sharing only a few of its isolates, and slowly at that.
“It's a very positive step on the part of the Indonesian government and ministry of health. And I hope that other countries will follow suit,” Dr. Cox said.
The CDC's influenza division is a reference laboratory for the WHO. The CDC and a laboratory at the University of Hong Kong run by influenza authority Dr. Malik Peiris have sequenced the human H5N1 viruses from Indonesia for the WHO. Dr. Peiris has also been asked by the WHO to release the Indonesian data in his possession.
On Friday, CDC staff transferred genetic codes of more than 300 individual H5N1 genes into an open access sequence bank called the Influenza Sequence Database. Dr. Cox said the data will also be logged into Genbank, a second open access database.
The Influenza Sequence Database is housed by the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory; the same computers host a password-protected WHO database that includes the sequences of all H5N1 viruses that have been turned over to the WHO system.
That limited access system has been harshly criticized by scientists who don't have access to it. They have complained that keeping the data sequestered in this way is impeding the global scientific community's ability to puzzle out the mysteries of this dangerous virus.
One of the things scientists will see by studying the Indonesian sequence data is that a number of viruses showed resistance to the antiviral drugs known as the adamantanes — amantadine and rimantadine. These older, generic drugs are substantially cheaper than Tamiflu and Relenza, the newer class of flu drugs called neuraminidase inhibitors.
While H5N1 viruses circulating in some other countries, like China, have shown resistance to the adamantane drugs for some time, Indonesian viruses have generally been vulnerable to the drugs. But CDC scientists saw a number of adamantane-resistant viruses, and there may be a trend emerging, Dr. Cox said.
“It's hard to say, really. But I would say that among the most recent viruses we've seen, a greater proportion were resistant.”
