Originally published October 3 2005
Controversy arises over CDC's lack of cooperation in information sharing
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Research on influenza is running into some obstacles, as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention tightly controls its information, prompting many in the public health field to question why policies are being determined without releasing information into the public domain.
Influenza researchers are being hindered in their work by the reluctance of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to share data, according to the journal Nature.
"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 before each flu season, are being made without making the data 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 10 percent were deposited by the CDC.
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