H5N1 Confirmed Near Moscow
Recombinomics Commentary
February 16, 2007
The H5N1 strain of bird flu has killed poultry in the Moscow region for the first time, Russia's chief sanitary expert and head of a consumer watchdog was quoted by RIA news agency as saying on Friday.
"The pathogenicity of this virus for people has not been confirmed. Vets have detected it, they confirm it is the H5N1 strain," Gennady Onishchenko said.
Workers on two farms near Moscow have been taken to hospital suspected of having the bird flu, Interfax agency cited the acting governor of the Moscow region, Alexei Pantelyeyev, as saying. He added that a few dozen birds had been culled.
The above comments describe confirmed H5N1 in a region just south of Moscow. H5N1 in this region has not been described previously. The confirmation provides additional evidence for widespread infections of Qinghai H5N1 in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, although most of the countries neighboring the confirmed regions have failed to report H5N1 this season.
Last year most countries in these regions did not report H5N1 until February or March, although H5N1 migrated into the region in the fall. Recently, H5N1 has been reported in Krasnodar, Hungary, England, Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, Nigeria, and the Ivory Coast. Thus far only Egypt and Nigeria have reported confirmed human cases this season, although there have been suspect cases in Azerbaijan, Turkey, England, and Iraq.
More information on the sequences of the new isolates would be useful. The new isolates in two regions in southeast Hungary are said to be 99.4% identical to Qinghai isolates from 2006 in Europe, and 99.96% identical to the isolates from the Turkey farm in Suffolk, UK. Only Egypt has released sequences for the current season.
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