In an age when a virus can circle the globe in less than a week, the WHO is now sounding the alarm on a dangerous trend: hoarding disease information to favor in-country laboratories for development of cures or vaccines.
The new coronavirus, which is very similar to SARS and has been renamed MERS, for Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, is a threat to the world community just as the old SARS was.
And it seems, some countries are withholding vital information on the character and virality of the virus in order to protect secrets that are vital in manufacturing vaccine and other medications.
But such 'hoarding' of information could spell disaster, just as it did when China delayed informing the World Community of the SARS epidemic years ago.
MERS has already killed 22 people and sickened 43. Its mortality rate is staggering so far. And diagnostic tests to identify the disease have been delayed by a foreign laboratory's attempt to retain the rights to the MERS virus.
In fact the WHO has already relayed that three months elapsed before important information of the virus reached the world health monitoring organization. The WHO was not even made aware of the discovery of the disease.
In fact the virus sample was stolen out of Saudi Arabia without that country's authorization and brought to the Netherlands to obtain patent rights.
But the patening procedure, which is at the basis of the delay in notification, also delayed the WHO's own serologic tests on the virus and the development of kits that identify the virus in suspected cases.
Since the disease so far has a high rate of mortality any information on the virus is crucial. One of the things that was paramount for the WHO was to find out whether the virus had become airborne, and transmissible from human to human. That was very important because the guidelines for treatment needed to include whether or not the patient needed to be isolated when treated.
Source : WHO /5.26.13
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