H5N1 Spread in Saudi Arabia
Recombinomics Commentary
November 16, 2007
Some 90,000 chicken have died of bird flu at a poultry farm in Muzahmiya City, western Riyadh, according to the Agriculture Ministry on Friday.
The above comments describe another significant H5N1 outbreak in Saudi Arabia. Earlier this week a cull of 50,000 birds in Al-Kharj, which is 150 kms south of Riydh, was announced. Muzahmiya is a southwestern suburb of Riyadh. Both of these outbreaks are significantly larger than the outbreak in March.
These outbreaks may be linked to the recent outbreak in England. The DEFRA website has now added France to the list of outbreaks over the summer that involved wild birds infected with H5N1 closely related to the massive outbreak at Uva Lake in Mongolia in the summer of 2006.
H5N1 closely related to that outbreak was not reported in Europe in late 2006 / early 2007, but that sub-clade was linked to the outbreaks in the past several months in the Czech Republic, Germany, France, Krasnodar, and now England.
Sequence data on the outbreaks in Saudi Arabia would be useful.
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