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H5N1 Spread to Four Provinces in Turkey?
Recombinomics Commentary
January 1, 2006
Turkish authorities last week said some chickens had tested positive for an H5 variant of bird flu and placed parts of an eastern town, Aralik, near the border with Armenia, under quarantine. The sick brothers and sisters are from the town of Dogubayazit, just 60 kilometers (37 miles) south of Aralik.
Other possible bird flu cases were reported elsewhere in eastern Turkey, prompting authorities to collect samples from dead turkeys, geese and chicken in eastern Kars and Erzurum provinces for testing, private NTV television reported Sunday.
The above comments suggests H5N1 has spread to four provinces in Eastern and Central Turkey. The OIE report filed on December 27 described 1200 chickens, geese, turkeys, and ducks that had died on four backyard farms in Aralik, as described above. The birds have tested positive for H5 and the high percentage of deaths(359 survived and were then culled), indicated that the deaths were due to HPAI H5N1. Outbreaks of H5N1 have been reported in the Volga Delta, Crimea Peninsula, and Danube Delta in December and a common HA cleavage site of GERRRKKR was reported for each region as well as western Turkey in October.
The comments above however suggest that H5N1 has now spread tp four adjacent provinces in central and eastern Turkey and the number of hospitalized cases has now grown to six, including the four children from the same family.
H5N1 has not been reported in humans outside of Asia.
If any of the six hospitalized patients are confirmed, the number of countries with confirmed human H5N1 cases will increase to six, and signal a dramatic expansion of the number of versions of H5N1 that can infect humans.
These latest cases are linked to migratory birds that are passing through the Middle East en route to Africa, where significant spread of H5N1 into humans would be expected.
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