Ngurah Rai International Airport in Bali is best known as a tourist hub, the bustling port of entry to a volcanic paradise. But when Indonesian authorities learned that a Mexican swine flu had gone global, that hub became a surreal microcosm of flu politics. Each arriving passenger was scanned for fever. A Dutch woman, apparently ill while in flight, was greeted by health workers in hazmat suits and whisked into quarantine while fellow passengers were spritzed with disinfectant. The woman was found to have nothing more than a bad sore throat, according to news reports, but that did not change a thing. The controversial head of the Indonesian Health Ministry, physician Siti Supari, quarantined sick foreigners at warp speed. Already embroiled in a battle royal with the world’s superpowers over another flu virus—the ultra-lethal bird flu—Supari did not have time to deal with a new enemy. She would do everything possible, she told her fellow citizens, to protect them from the new pathogen spawned by a pig.
The recent frenzy in Bali stood in notable contrast to the research paralysis that has gripped this tropical archipelago since late 2006, when Supari declared that flu viruses circulating in Indonesia belonged to her government alone. It was a bizarre, 21st-century twist on an age-old intellectual property argument. Developing nations had long fought passionately over plant and native human genes, but no one had ever before staked claim to microbes that birds could carry anywhere. Yet the 57-year-old health minister insisted she had cause: Rich Western nations were patenting the viral genomes, then using the information to create vaccines that were sold for profit to other Western powers while benefiting Indonesia not at all.
If Supari had stopped there, she might have garnered real support. But she ramped up the rhetoric, launching a barrage of fear bombs by accusing the United States of genetically engineering H1N1 (the swine flu virus) and H5N1 (the bird flu pathogen) as biological weapons. Wielding those charges, she flouted agreements with the World Health Organization (WHO), refusing to share samples from Indonesians infected with avian influenza—specimens the rest of the world desperately needs to track a virus on the move.
Supari not only has clamped down on viral and epidemiological information but has also cut off cooperation with NAMRU-2, the U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit in Indonesia’s capital city, Jakarta. Since 1970 the lab has helped advance knowledge on a range of infectious diseases, including malaria, dengue, and, more recently, bird flu in Southeast Asia. But Supari wants the Americans and their scientific paraphernalia to get out.
This standoff has escalated into a full-blown geopolitical dispute over influenza viruses. Negotiations are so delicate that talks on the U.S. end have risen to the highest levels of diplomacy. The State Department would neither confirm nor deny that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to Indonesia in February had something to do with NAMRU-2. “We have no comment on the secretary’s private conversations,” said a source who requested anonymity. Despite intermittent signs of a thaw, this past May Supari reportedly threatened with severe punishment any Indonesian scientist caught conducting experiments with researchers at the naval laboratory. Once bustling with scientists, that lab now has only a handful of researchers, all on temporary visas.
