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Tuesday, October 04, 2005In its Sept. 22 issue, the journal Nature reported widespread concern among influenza researchers that too little flu data collected by the CDC are being made available for research, hindering their efforts to develop flu vaccines. Dr. Nancy J. Cox, chief of CDC's influenza branch, said the increasing focus on influenza worldwide has brought a deluge of requests for information that the CDC cannot easily accommodate. 'Given the sheer volume of such requests, we have had to make hard choices about how to respond because we do not have the capacity to comply with all requests while also meeting our other public health responsibilities,' she said in a written response to questions. One unnamed National Institutes of Health researcher told Nature that, other than the occasional large deposits of data required by journals to accompany published papers, information from CDC is 'coming through an eye dropper.' Influenza researchers said their work would progress faster if they could access the disease control agency's databases of virus sequences and immunological and epidemiological data. Nature quoted Michael Deem, a physicist at Rice University in Houston, 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 in New Mexico. By comparison, a consortium led by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases deposited more than 2,800 sequences this year alone. posted by Sydney on 10/04/2005 02:28:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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