|
|
|
 
 
 
 
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
|
|
|
Indonesia refuses to send bird flu virus to American lab fearing Bush may use the same for bio weapons on nonwhite countries
Recently Indonesia's health minister stopped sending bird flu viruses to a research laboratory in the U.S. for fear Washington could use them to make biological weapons.
Bird flu has killed more than 240 people across the world since 2003, nearly half of them in Indonesia.
Indonesia's health minister Siti Fadilah Supari first drew widespread attention when she boycotted the World Health Organization's 50-year-old virus sharing system last year, saying pharmaceutical companies were using viruses from developing nations without their knowledge to make expensive vaccines. She has since called for the creation of a global stockpile of drugs or other forms of benefit sharing.
The danger of biological warfare use depends on the specific virus or bacteria. But most experts agree that bird flu vaccines cannot be genetically altered to create weapons because they contain an inactivated virus that cannot be resuscitated. But many do not agree with that hypothesis.
It's unlikely they would be used to create a resistant strain of the virus as part of efforts to wreak havoc within global poultry stocks. If enemy states wanted to do that, they could make their own vaccines or turn to a less hostile country like China, said Ian Ramshaw, an expert on vaccine immunology and biosecurity at The Australian National University in Canberra.
WORLD ARTICLES
|
|
| Click here to get ad specs and place your ad or Click here to contact the advertisement department |
Send Letters to the Editor
|
Add RSS headlines