H5N1 Positive Patient in Qena Egypt
Recombinomics Commentary
June 8, 2007
A 10-year-old girl from southern Egypt has been infected with the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus, and is in "very critical" condition, a World Health Organisation official said on Friday.
"There is a new human case just reported by the Ministry of Health.
Egypt's state news agency MENA reported that the girl, from the southern town of Qena, was in hospital on a respirator.
The above comments on a new H5N1 case in Qena in southern Egypt is cause for concern. In March and April there were several case of children infected with H5N1 in Aswan. These cases were mild and the children recovered quickly. US NAMRU-3 sequencing of these cases showed that they were distinct from the H5N1 cases in northern Egypt. The HA sequences had a novel cleavage site previously reported in whooper swans in Mongolia.
Other mild cases from central Egypt, including siblings from Qena, had a 3 BP deletion in HA. The NA of the siblings had G743A, which was concerrently appended to various Qinghai genetic backbones in Russia, Egypt, and Ghana.
The sequences in Egypt this season formed multiple sub-clades with Egyptian markers that were also found last season in isolates from Egypt, Djibouti, Israel, and Gaza. Last season, only Djibouti and Egypt reported human cases.
This season, only Egypt reported human cases, but the last case developed symptoms on March 30.
Sequence data on the new case will be of interest.
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