JAKARTA, INDONESIA — Threats to shut down a U.S. Navy medical research lab here may undermine the hunt for mutating viruses that could set off the next flu pandemic, Western scientists warn.
Indonesia suspended negotiations with the United States over the fate of Naval Medical Research Unit No. 2 last month after senior politicians said it didn't benefit Indonesia and could be a cover for spying.
The U.S. Embassy firmly denied that the facility is used to gather intelligence, and said most of the lab's staff members are Indonesians helping with research carried out in cooperation with local health officials.
The biomedical research lab opened in Jakarta in 1970 and is used to study tropical diseases, including malaria, dengue fever and avian flu, according to an embassy fact sheet.
It has a staff of about 175 scientists, doctors, veterinarians and technologists; only 19 are Americans and the rest are Indonesians. The Navy also has research labs in Egypt, Kenya, Peru and Thailand.
Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono said last month that his ministry recommended that the lab be closed because its operations were too secretive and were incompatible with Indonesia's security interests. Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari also said she had recommended to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono that it be closed.
"I've told the president the lab's useless, the cooperation degrades our sovereignty and it should be shut down," Supari told members of parliament last month. "He told me to shut it if I think it's [of] no use."
Negotiations on the lab would resume as early as this month, the Foreign Ministry said, once the country had a "unified stand" on the issue. But U.S. Embassy spokesman Tristram Perry said he was not aware of any date for talks to resume.
U.S. officials say privately that the dispute is part of a bigger argument over sharing virus samples, including strains of the avian flu, which the World Health Organization warns could set off a pandemic.
Before Indonesia announced in January 2007 that it would no longer share samples with other countries, the U.S. naval lab did research on normal flu viruses from seasonal outbreaks as well as bird flu cases treated in Indonesian hospitals.
"Sometimes you test a virus and you don't know if it's avian influenza, or normal flu or something completely different," said a Western scientist who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.
