Researchers accuse CDC of hoarding influenza data

• Influenza researchers are being hindered in their work by the United States' disease control agency's reluctance to share data, according to the journal Nature.
• Its Thursday edition reports widespread concerns that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was not making enough flu data available.
• "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," Michael Deem of Rice University in Houston, who works on predicting flu vaccine efficiency, was quoted as saying.
• Policy decisions, such as which vaccine to produce ahead of each flu season, are being made without the data being available to the scientific community, he added.
• One evolutionary ecologist, who declined to be named, said: "Getting data from them has been somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible."
• Nature said that of about 15,000 influenza A sequences in the gene database Genbank and the influenza sequence database at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, fewer than a tenth were deposited by the CDC.