With the publication of WHO’s guidance on the principles of data sharing for pathogens the steering committee of the WHO measles and rubella databases recommended a review of compliance with the recommendations. As part of the review a questionnaire was complied and sent to members of the committee and colleagues in the WHO measles and rubella laboratory network. 

Although most respondents felt that there should be access to the databases to non-WHO laboratories (as previously for MeaNS, but never for RubeNS), however there were major concerns about how this would affect the quality of the data. In addition, there were widespread concerns about downloading sequences from MeaNS/RubeNS, apart from perhaps the ability to download a country’s own sequence data, and several laboratories said they would not continue to provide sequence data if downloading data from other laboratories was permitted. 

The responses of the questionnaire were reviewed at the steering committee meeting at the end of August 2023. It was decided in the light of the concerns there would be no changes to the current operating of the databases, but instead countries who were happy to share their data should be encouraged to submit the data to GenBank. To encourage this the development of a tool for submissions of sequences to GenBank from the databases should be made a priority.