Teaching Comparative

Viral sovereignty

Here's a topic for considering the meaning and implications of sovereignty. How would your students respond?

The article is by Richard Holbrooke, a former US ambassador to the United Nations, who is president of the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria and Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.

When “Sovereignty” Risks Global Health

"Here’s a concept you’ve probably never heard of: 'viral sovereignty.' This dangerous idea comes to us courtesy of Indonesia’s minister of health, Siti Fadilah Supari, who asserts that deadly viruses are the sovereign property of individual nations – even though they cross borders and could pose a pandemic threat to all the world’s peoples...

"The vast majority of avian flu outbreaks in the past four years, in both humans and poultry, have occurred in Indonesia. At least 53 types of H5N1 bird flu viruses have appeared in chickens and people there, according to the World Health Organization.

"Yet, since 2005, Indonesia has shared with the WHO samples from only two of the more than 135 people known to have been infected with H5N1 (110 of whom have died). Worse, Indonesia is no longer providing the WHO with timely notification of bird flu outbreaks or human cases. Since 2007, its government has openly defied international health regulations and a host of other WHO agreements to which Indonesia is a signatory...

"A year ago, Supari’s assertions about 'viral sovereignty' seemed anomalous. Disturbingly, however, the notion has morphed into a global movement, fueled by self-destructive, anti-Western sentiments...

"Indonesia argues that a nation’s right to control all information on locally discovered viruses should be protected through the same mechanisms that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization uses to guarantee poor countries’ rights of ownership and patents on the seeds of its indigenous plants...

"It is dangerous folly, however, to extend this policy to viruses. If the concept of 'viral sovereignty' had been applied to HIV 25 years ago, we would not have central repositories of thousands of varieties of HIV today; these allow scientists to test drugs and vaccines against all the different strains of the virus that causes AIDS. It is even more ludicrous to extend the sovereignty notion to viruses that, like flu, can be carried across international borders by migratory birds.

"In this age of globalization, failure to make viral samples freely available risks allowing the emergence of a new strain of influenza that could go unnoticed until it is capable of exacting the sort of toll taken by the pandemic that killed tens of millions in 1918...

"Outrageously, Supari has charged that the WHO would give any viruses – not just H5N1 – to drug companies, which in turn would make products designed to sicken poor people, in order 'to prolong their profitable business by selling new vaccines'...

---

Labels: concepts, sovereignty, theory

posted by Ken Wedding @ 8:13 AM