NEW YORK, March 10 (GenomeWeb News) - Pittsburgh-based Recombinomics today asked the World Health Organization to give global researchers open access to H5N1 avian flu genome sequences. Currently the sequences are in a WHO database that can be accessed by only 15 laboratories.
"These sequences should be made available immediately to the general scientific community," Recombinomics said in a statement.
The WHO database contains the only gene sequences from confirmed H5N1-positive human patients in Turkey, Iraq, and China, the company said. This week the US announced a new target from a patient in Indonesia.