NEWS agencies in Russia reported last week that migratory birds might have carried the H5N1 bird flu to Siberia. But scientists there say the virus they found is not the same as the one causing the outbreaks in east Asia.
鈥淔rom one sample from a duck collected in autumn 2003, we have isolated H5 virus,鈥� Alexander Shestopalov, head of the monitoring programme at Vector, the state virology laboratory near Novosibirsk, told New 杏吧原创. 鈥淏ut I have made a sequence of the H5 gene, and it is distinct from the pathogenic virus in south-east Asia and China.鈥�
Birds from all over Asia spend the summer in Siberia, and Vector has been monitoring them for avian flu since 2001. The 2004 samples have not yet been tested. American scientists monitoring birds in the Aleutian Islands, where east Asian and North American birds mix in summer, had found no H5 as of March this year.
Advertisement
Governments in east Asia have blamed migrating birds for outbreaks in their region, which have killed at least 32 people and millions of chickens. These accusations were renewed last week when Hong Kong found that a dead grey heron was carrying H5N1. But so far the evidence suggests that the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain kills wild birds before they can spread it far afield.