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Suspect Fatal Case of H5N1 Bird Flu in Guangdong
Recombinomics Commentary
March 4, 2006
A man has died of suspected H5N1 avian influenza in southern China, just over the border from Hong Kong, a local newspaper said on Saturday.
The 32-year-old man frequently visited wet markets where chickens were often slaughtered, the South China Morning Post said.
He developed fever and pneumonia on February 22 and died on March 2, Hong Kong's Center for Health Protection (CHP) said in a statement late on Friday.
The above comments suggest H5N1 bird flu is spreading in China. There have been no official reported H5N1 outbreaks in Guangdong, although media reports indicate there have been several outbreaks. Moreover, H5N1 has been confirmed in wild birds in Hong Kong on several occasions recently and an H5N1 recombinant sequence from Guangdong was just deposited at GenBank.
H5N1 in Hong Kong is said to be related to prior H5N1 isolates from Japan and Korea. Although antibodies have been reported in poultry workers from those countries, there have been no human fatalities reported for this strain.
Many of the changes in H5N1 have been linked to recombination, which can have significant effects on the ability to infect humans. The first confirmed fatal infection by the Qinghai strain of H5N1 had the S227N change. Publication of the sequences from Hong Kong would be useful. These sequences have been kept in a private database that is password protected.
Friday a call was made to make the data public. Hong Kong has a large number of such sequences including human isolates from Indonesia, where fatal human cases are being reported on a daily basis.
This sequence data should be released immediately.
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