Immunocompetent

WHO has posted the Chair's Text to be considered in December at the next installment of the WHO Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Intergovernmental Meeting (WHO PIP IGM).  The meeting name is a mouthful; but all you need to remember is that this is the group that is trying to resolve the virus sharing controversies.

The Chair's lengthy text is exactly that, a text drafted by the Chair of the meeting, and word on the street is that the Australia's Jane Halton actually did do much of the drafting. (Often "Chair's texts" are only nominally written by the Chair.)

Too bad the text doesn't do a better job of plugging gaps in the system and reflecting the proposals of developing countries.  A complete listing of problems great and small would probably explode this blog's buffer; but, in short form, here are some of the key problems in Halton's text that will have to be resolved:  (More)

 Update: 6 September 2008

An Important Note About This Blog Entry

The short essay below was originally written as a Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post, because I believed that it was very important to publicly correct the numerous errors and misperceptions contained in the Holbrooke / Garrett editorial.

When the Washington Post did not publish the letter, I sent it to a number people and urgently asked them if they would be so kind as to put forward the ideas contained in the letter, given the important international humanitarian interest in reforming the GISN.

I was therefore very grateful when Ambassador Wibisono of Indonesia adapted the essay below and was able to have it published in the Jakarta Post on my behalf. An utmost priority in the debate over influenza virus sharing is widely circulating the powerful arguments for changing the current system, therefore, I again thank Ambassador Wibisono for his willingness to carry this message to a broader public.

EH

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... and it's time for America to wake up to that fact.

In their badly informed Washington Post op-ed "'Sovereignty' That Risks Global Health" (10 August), Richard Holbrooke and Laurie Garrett make a number of factual mistakes and misleading statements, some of which I will enumerate here.

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One of the things that's got a lot of the Cro-Mag Indonesia bashers up in arms is that Jakarta is asking the US (and other countries) to sign reasonable Material Transfer Agreements for influenza viruses, in the context of an unbiased WHO system.

Wow, how radical and anti-American.  Not.

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Back when I ran the Sunshine Project, and with the help of Third World Network, I wrote a brief item describing how the WHO Global Influenza Surveillance Network could be reformed. We distributed this at a meeting of the WHO Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Intergovernmental Meeting (WHO PIP IGM). (Yes, it's a mouthful.)

The jist of the following nearly year-old article is still about right. I should have given more attention to sequence data, with the rapid rise of synthetic biology; but it's there in rudimentary form. Take a gander at this short piece if you want to know what some of us are thinking about for a New Global System.

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