Sliding with short steps onto the stage in front of a crowd of students, academics and supporters, Indonesia's Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari is in her element.
Her hair swept up into the voluminous bouffant favoured by Indonesia's wealthy ladies, the bespectacled 57-year-old delivers her scalding critique of global injustice in soft, rounded Javanese vowels that frequently trail into a whisper.
The venue is a university discussion of her memoir-cum-manifesto, "It's Time for the World to Change: Divine Hands Behind Avian Influenza," and the audience bursts into applause as she issues her broadsides.
Supari is in charge of the response to bird flu in the country most heavily hit by the virus. With 112 dead and counting, Indonesia accounts for nearly half of all human deaths from the disease.
If the H5N1 virus mutates into a form easily transmissible between humans, setting off a worldwide pandemic that could kill millions, it will likely happen here.
But while most governments have set about tracking the spread and development of the bug, Supari has turned the fight against avian influenza into a broader struggle over the soul of globalisation.
Since late 2006 Supari has refused to share all but a handful of Indonesia's virus samples with the World Health Organisation (WHO), saying Indonesia will only resume if the system is changed to give poor countries control over where their viruses go, and a share of any profits from vaccines.
Addressing the crowd, Supari accused rich countries and the WHO of a conspiracy to trick poor nations into giving away virus samples, which she says are passed on to drug companies for their own profit.
"Then the virus is turned into vaccines (that are sent to) Indonesia and Indonesia has to buy them and if they don't buy them, they have to go into debt and it turns and turns again, and in the end developed countries make new viruses which are then sent to developing countries," she said.
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Supari claimed vindication in early 2007 after Australian drug company CSL came forward with a trial vaccine containing Indonesian bird flu strains.
CSL freely admits to using Indonesian strains but says under current WHO rules it is under no obligation to compensate Indonesia or guarantee access, company spokeswoman Rachel David says.
"The concerns that were raised by the Indonesia health minister (in 2007) were legitimate, and of course she was concerned about the access of Indonesia to pandemic vaccines, but it was essentially not something CSL was in a position to help with," she says.
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'The nuttiest idea I've ever heard'
Even some who sympathise with Supari's charge that corporations rig the global health system think she is playing a dangerous game.
Keeping samples away from international scientists leaves the world dangerously uninformed about the virus and potentially unaware of an emerging pandemic, says Kartono Mohamad, former head of Indonesia's doctor's association.
"If something happens then maybe Indonesia is to blame if we cannot help the world contain the virus," he says.
"She has a point, but she's gambling. She's not only gambling with the virus but the safety and security of the Indonesian people as well."
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"She has kind of become giddy because many people, especially the Islamic organisations, see her as a hero, a new hero in this country because she is fighting the United States," former top doctor Kartono Mohamad says.
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"I disagree with her approach, with the way she is talking to other parties and actually that approach puts us in a difficult position. For example, I have lost some friends, research fellows," says the head of the expert panel of Indonesia's bird flu committee, Amin Subandrio.
Despite her anti-Western rhetoric, Supari has also frozen most Indonesian scientists out of access to virus samples, Subandrio said.
"Some of the statements in her book are not based on evidence but probably only based on information from some person, I don't know who is giving her information," Subandrio says.
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hat tip: http://aidailydigest.blogspot.com/#id_35675
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