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.
“From one sample from a duck collected in autumn 2003, we have isolated H5 virus,” Alexander Shestopalov, head of the monitoring programme at Vector, the state virology laboratory near Novosibirsk, told Â鶹´«Ã½. “But I have made a sequence of the H5 gene, and it is distinct from the pathogenic virus in south-east Asia and China.”
Birds from all over…
