# 2918
Yesterday, Indonesia’s Health Minister Siti Fadillah Supari called upon her country’s medical institutions to do their own virus and DNA research without accepting foreign funding.
She stated that she believed foreign governments would use their own viruses to attack them.
Well, this is the run up to national elections next month. A certain amount of hyperbole and pandering to fervent nationalism is to be expected, I suppose.
This is how the story was reported in the Jakarta Globe.
Dessy Sagita
Minister Wary of Foreign ‘Attack’
Health Minister Siti Fadillah Supari on Friday called the country’s medical institutions to carry out their own virus and DNA research free of foreign funding so as to avoid exploitation from developed countries and the possibility of a future biological attack against the nation.
“I’m truly afraid the world will use our viruses or DNAs to create a mass biological weapon that may be used to attack us,” she said.
Supari surprised the world when she abruptly stopped sending bird flu virus samples to the World Health Organization in 2007. Supari said the WHO wanted the virus to create an effective bird flu vaccine using the Indonesian strain but offered nothing in return.
She said Indonesia was perceived by many countries as both a potential object of exploitation and a promising market for new vaccines. The minister said that the virus samples were given for free but Indonesia had to later purchase the vaccine — developed using those samples — at high prices.
Today, the Jakarta Globe has an editorial on all of this, and they find very little to like about Minister Supari’s recent call for scientific isolationism.
A hat tip to History Lover on the Flu Wiki for posting this link.
Opinion / Editorials / Article
Editorial
Keeping Medical Research Open
Indonesia does not exactly score high marks for research and development in the health sector, with only a handful of institutions undertaking any significant work. This is due to a number of factors, chief among them a lack of funding and a lack of trained researchers.
Now Health Minister Siti Fadillah Supari has made it even more difficult for local medical research institutions to do meaningful work by preventing them from accepting foreign funding with an eye to preventing later exploitation and intervention.
Supari said that all research conducted in Indonesia should abide by a decree she issued last year governing the use of Indonesian biological substances, including viruses and DNA samples. The decree was to prevent Indonesia from being exploited as both a source of material and as a market for vaccines.
The minister in fact had a very public row with the World Health Organization over the use of avian flu strains. While Indonesia provided the viruses for free, the country was forced to buy the vaccines developed from the samples provided at high prices. Supari surprised the world when she abruptly stopped sending bird flu samples to the WHO. Supari also said the decree she issued was aimed at reducing Indonesia’s dependency on foreign funding, especially for research of potentially pandemic diseases such as bird flu.
<snip>
In today’s globalized world, coordination and cooperation between medical institutions is vital in dealing with new and ever more portent diseases. We would argue that the minister should instead look at the broader picture on how medical science is evolving in more advanced countries and work to tie up with leading global medical research institutions.
