Trouble for the Flu Fighters

By Brian Bennett

Last month at the U.N., George W. Bush told "as many leaders as I could find" about the need to track the avian-flu virus so that "the world scientific community can analyze the facts." But the ability of scientists in poorer countries to do just that could suffer when federal funding for the Los Alamos Influenza Sequence Database runs out at the end of the month. Until now, access to the online database--used by researchers to compare the genetic codes of new flu strains with the world's biggest collection of flu sequences--has been free. But Los Alamos officials say that without a new injection of funding, they will have to charge up to $10,000 a year for access to the site flu.lanl.gov Cash-strapped labs in Cambodia and Vietnam--two known epicenters of avian-flu outbreaks--have already said they can't afford that.

The cost of maintaining the site is only in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, says Los Alamos executive Allen Morris. Still, he says, "we're running on vapor." Barack Obama--who helped win Senate approval for $3.9 billion in flu preparedness and response plans and wants Bush to appoint a flu czar "so that things like this don't slip through the cracks"--says that making the site subscription-based only is "an example of the insufficient investment" in U.S. readiness for a pandemic. Meanwhile, there are new reminders that birds--and viruses--don't respect borders. Croatia tested dead swans last week for the virulent H5N1 strain, Russia culled infected poultry, and a man in Thailand became the 67th human to die of avian flu.