Originally posted by Thomas Crowne

Originally posted by soficrow

The US government is using the 2002 Bioterrorism Act to obstruct access to scientific data about bird flu so that the information will remain privately owned and controlled, and can be used for profiteering.

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Okay, here is the heart of your matter.
Your communal, socialistic mindset is having difficulty with the idea of anyone making a profit.

No. My issue is with anyone purposefully orchestrating a situation to profiteer. Two different concepts, although related.

I can really help you with this.

No doubt.

Companies do not make large profits from flu vaccines. It is just about a pro bono operation. There is not great benefit to the company and there is no benefit to the government; that is to say, no profit.

Please review the background information contained here:

Now, let's think about this from another angle. Considering the 1918 flu pandemic was so brutal, and considering there just might be those who'd like to create instability throughout the world (besides the OWO gang), do you think maybe there could be other concerns besides the false notion that there is money to be made in flu vaccines?

Hey, why we're at, why don't we just hand out samples of other deadly and pandamic-creating diseases. Nah, there is no potential doom in disaster in that, is there?

you've twisted and turned and writhed in every direction possible to turn nothing into something, and it just isn't working when one one realizes your aim.

Ottawa bird flu conference needs to bring fight to animals

Several countries have announced plans to build stocks of antiviral drugs and vaccines to combat the threat. Governments also have destroyed some 140 million birds wherever the virus has been found.

"All of these measures are good, but they are only the second line of defense," UN Food and Agriculture Organization head Jacques Diouf told AFP. "The real battleground is on the animal front."

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“It doesn’t look to us quite rational that we would be ready to spend so much money on the second line of defence and then on the first line of the combat field, we’re not putting even $100 million,” Diouf said in an interview.

Animal Control is Key

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Many of the countries most affected are poor and lack the money either for proper surveillance or to pay farmers compensation for animals that need to be culled, he said.

"Much more medium- and long-term strategic and material input is required for countries and regions to be in a sufficiently strong position to avert further damage to industry and global human health," he said.

World not doing enough to fight bird flu


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Pandemic planning shouldn't overlook need to fix source agricultural problems

"Our first line of defence should be attacking the problem at the poultry level," Dr. Alejandro Thiermann, adviser to the director general of the OIE, said in the opening session of the 1 1/2 day gathering of health ministers from developed and developing countries. ..."So far, it is our opinion, that the international community has drastically underinvested in the veterinary infrastructure required to support this vitally important program."

The funds would be used to foster veterinary skills in the affected region, beef up surveillance for poultry outbreaks and compensate farmers for the destruction of infected birds. ..."Unless the people who are affected - and many of them are poor people, they are the ones raising these poultry or ducks - unless they are duly compensated when there is a culling of their animals, they will not be co-operating. And they will also be hiding their animals and the avian influenza may spread," Diouf said. ...Since the H5N1 outbreaks first came to light in South Korea in late 2003, an estimated 140 million birds have been killed by the virus or culled because the disease. Economic losses are in the range of $10 billion.

"We know that farmers in many of these countries are destitute and if in one of these countries, a very poor farmer decides not take the necessary means, something will happen, unfortunately," (Canada's Prime Minister) Martin said. "And if it happens in an Asian country - it will happen here as well."

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Fears of a bird flu pandemic among people has seriously hampered efforts to prevent the spread of an outbreak among birds because not enough money is being spent on prevention and surveillance... Diouf said the FAO and the World Organization for Animal Health had developed a detailed $175 million strategy for controlling avian flu in birds. So far the two bodies have only received pledges of aid totaling about $30 million and donors have not yet handed over a single cent.

World not doing enough to fight bird flu-officials

Ottawa bird flu conference needs to bring fight to animals

Pandemic planning shouldn't overlook need to fix source agricultural problems

Discussions at the conference will take place along four themes: the intersect of animal and human health concerns; the need to build surveillance and scientific capacity in affected countries; risk communications and the development and access to antiviral drugs and vaccines. ...On that last point, the meeting will hear a proposal from Julio Frenk, Mexico's health minister, calling on wealthier nations to devote 10 per cent of their stores of antivirals as well as help mid-level countries develop vaccines so more of the world's people can be protected in the event of a pandemic.

"Just imagine the ethical, political and security implications of a world where only rich countries have access to life-saving drugs or vaccines, and the rest of the world stands while they march towards death," Frenk said in an interview. "That is an unsustainable scenario."

Health ministers meet over bird flu plans

...some officials at the opening of a two-day conference on battling a potential flu pandemic were discussing whether they might have to break international patent regulations to produce generic versions of Tamiflu if it came down to saving their civilians.

"A suggestion that's being made by some countries is that there are countries that have the capacity to manufacture the vaccine, that we actually need to assist them with technology transfers," Canada's Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh told a news conference. He said technology transfers was "a euphemism for loosening the patent laws."

The World Trade Organization in 2003 decided to allow governments to override patents during national health crises, though no member state has yet invoked the clause.

Tamiflu
www.grandforks.com...]Tamiflu Patent[/url]

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Canada's top health official said Monday the international community was "concerned" about the reluctance of Swiss drug giant Roche to allow generic versions of its antiviral drug that could protect millions from a bird flu pandemic.

"In Canada, we respect the intellectual property but we also have regulations that in an emergency we have the mechanism to deal with that kind of an issue very quickly," he said... Earlier Monday, Roche cautioned countries against producing their own generic versions of the drug Tamiflu, which has been shown to lessen the effects of flu in humans. Roche holds the patent until 2016.

Bird flu: concern over Roche licences

MD: Avian flu must mutate for it to sicken humans

Since December 2003, the H5N1 strain of bird flu has turned up in at least 10 Asian countries, infecting more than 100 people, killing at least 60 of them. ...It is believed to have spread when humans came in contact with an infected bird or a contaminated surface, according to the CDC. Human to human spread of the virus is rare and has not continued beyond one other person, the CDC said.

On September 29 the World Health Organization warned that an avian flu pandemic among humans was "imminent" and urged all nations to make preparations for battling an outbreak.

Siegel, an associate professor at New York University School of Medicine, said the world health community must improve vaccine mass production. Current manufacturing technology is about 50 years old and involves creating vaccines in fertilized chicken eggs. ..."We can use genetic engineering and get a vaccine very quickly, but we are busy using the old chicken-egg medium which takes three to six months to make a vaccine," he said. "I think we need to upgrade our ability to make vaccines quickly."

U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt said Thursday the world is "woefully unprepared" to respond to a pandemic. He said the United States must "have surveillance domestically, so if it shows up here we know about it very quickly."

Researchers, advocates flay CDC data secrecy

Scientists are accusing the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of hoarding crucial data that could help vaccinations at a time when there is growing concern about a possible influenza pandemic. ...The nation's disease control center also is under fire from open-government advocates for recently issuing a guide on how to keep other data, documents and information from public inspection. Called the "Information Security" manual, the 34-page document provides officials with 19 categories to shield data from public scrutiny without obtaining a secret classification marking.

Open government advocates say the CDC's actions run counter to its mission. The CDC's role is to disseminate public health information, not withhold it, said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' project on government secrecy, which first published the leaked manual on its Web site. ..."The CDC is not the CIA," Aftergood said. "Withholding data is not just bad public policy, it is bad science."

The Sept. 22 issue of the journal Nature reported widespread concern among influenza researchers that too little flu data collected by the CDC are made available for research, hindering their efforts to develop flu vaccines. ...One U.S. Institutes of Health researcher told the magazine that other than the occasional large deposits of data that accompany published papers required by journals, information is "coming through an eyedropper."

Nearly all of the scientific associations and scientists interviewed for this story declined to comment on the record. The issue is "delicate," one person explained, because the CDC controls funding for research.

Secrecy at Centers for Disease Control Criticized

The Centers for Disease Control have come under criticism from scientists because of their tight control of information, Cox Newspapers reports. An article in the journal Nature focuses on the CDC’s failure to make available data it has collected on flu strains, which scientists say has slowed research on the viruses. Open government advocates has also criticized the CDC’s publication of an “Information Security” manual setting out 19 categories of unclassified information to be shielded. (10/4/05)

Concern grows over secrecy at CDC

Nature quoted Michael Deem, a scientist at Rice University, as saying: "Many in the influenza field are displeased with the CDC's practice of refusing to deposit sequences of most of the strains that they sequence." ...Nature's own analyses found that the CDC deposited less than a tenth of the 15,000 influenza A sequences in the gene database Genbank and the influenza sequence database at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. By comparison, a consortium led by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases deposited more than 2,800 sequences this year alone.

One concern the CDC may have about sharing data is how it would affect any partnership it might have with vaccine manufacturers, said David Webster, president of Webster Consulting Group Inc., a health-industry consulting firm.

The CDC might be concerned that those manufacturers might not be able to recoup their investment if the information is widely available.

CDC locks up flu data

Given the threat of a biological attack by a terrorist group, there may be sound reasoning for securing certain information, said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel at the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

However, the CDC manual shows a "shift in the agency mind-set from one that assumes openness to one that assumes secrecy," Fuchs said.

"It's worth understanding that secrecy is not necessarily going to advance the public's health," Fuchs said. "It's troubling and causes one to pause."

Poor Countries Square Off With WHO Over Access To Bird Flu Vaccine

The World Health Organization might guarantee that poor nations get access to bird flu vaccines in the event of a pandemic, the top WHO flu official said Monday, hoping to end a dispute triggered by Indonesia's decision to stop sharing virus samples.

Indonesia - the nation hardest hit by bird flu, with 66 human deaths - is refusing to send samples of the H5N1 bird flu virus to WHO until it stops sharing them with commercial vaccine makers.

The cash-strapped country says the current system is unfair because it cannot afford vaccines produced using its strains.

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Asian nations, WHO meet over H5N1 sharing row

Drawing up rules aimed at restricting how virus samples shared amongst countries are used would slow down global efforts to develop vaccines, the World Health Organisation's top bird flu official said on Monday.

Indonesia, which is hosting a WHO meeting with health officials from 18 nations to discuss the issue, has said it will only share samples of the H5N1 avian influenza virus if it has guarantees they will not be used commercially.

Some health and aid agencies have criticised Indonesia for refusing to share samples, while others defended the stance because developing countries often struggle to get access to life-saving drugs due to patent laws and high costs.

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To ensure it has access to a bird flu vaccine, Indonesia has reached a tentative agreement with U.S. drug manufacturer Baxter Healthcare Corp. Under the deal, Indonesia would provide the virus in exchange for Baxter's expertise in vaccine production.

Leavitt Statement on the WHO Global Pandemic Influenza Action Plan to Increase Vaccine Supply

Efforts to increase the availability of influenza vaccines in developing countries, however, should not compromise the integrity of the 50-year-old WHO Global Influenza-Surveillance Network, which provides early warning of evolving influenza virus strains, both seasonal and those with pandemic potential. All nations have a responsibility to share data and virus samples.

Responding to a pandemic will demand the cooperation of the world community, as no nation can go it alone. If a country is to protect its own people, it must work together with other nations to protect the people of the world.