H5N1 Confirmed on Crimea Peninsula
Recombinomics Commentary 12:50
January 18, 2008
Dozens of chickens at a Ukrainian poultry farm have died from the H5N1 bird-flu virus, the Interfax news agency reported Friday. Inspectors found 153 birds dead from the disease at the Lobzenko poultry factory in a central region of the Black Sea peninsula Crimea.
The above comments describe another outbreak of H5N1 in Europe (see satellite map). The Crimea peninsula is frequented by migratory birds, but like Romania, the infection of domestic poultry was made in the absence of a reported recent outbreak in wild birds. This discovery sequence mimics the result in Romania, where H5N1 was detected in domestic poultry in the Danube Delta. In Krasnodar, H5N1 was detected in a whooper swan as well as domestic poultry. Sequences from the fall, 2007 outbreaks in Romania and Krasnodar have been released. The cat, chicken, and duck sequences from Romania are identical and are the Uva Lake strain. Similarly, the whooper swan and chicken HA sequences from Krasnodar match each other, and are also the Uva Lake strain, but more closely related to the sequences from Germany collected in the summer of 2007.
The timing and location of the Ukraine outbreak indicates it is also due to the Uva Lake strain, and relaxed surveillance of wild birds has produced yet another example of H5N1 infections in domestic poultry in the absence of detection of H5N1 in wild birds.
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