Uva Lake H5N1 in Saudi Arabia
Recombinomics Commentary 07:50
February 18, 2008
Sequences from H5N1 in Saudia Arabia have been released at Genbank. One of the HA sequences, A/houbara bustard/Saudi Arabia/6732-1/2007, is the Uva Lake strain. It is most closely related to the recently published sequences from Romania, but recent published sequences from Germany, Krasnodar, and Romania all fall onto the same branch which traces back to the wild bird outbreak at Uva Lake in the summer of 2006.
Those sequences were subsequently found in South Korea at the end of 2006 and then were reportedly found in the outbreak in Kuwait in early 2007. The subsequent outbreaks in the summer and fall in Europe have been confirmed to be related by published sequences or said to be related by sequencing labs.
The detection in Saudia Arabia is not a surprise because of the characterization of the outbreak in Kuwait, or the migratory path of houbara bustard (Chlamydotis undulata macqueenii).
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