Abstract
Recently, novel variants of H5 highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses (AIVs) have been frequently isolated from poultry and wild birds in Asia, Europe and North America. Live poultry markets (LPMs) play an important role in the dissemination of influenza viruses. Four H5N2 AIVs were isolated from poultry during surveillance of AIVs in LPMs in Eastern China, in 2015. Whole-genome sequencing, combined with phylogenetic and antigenic analyses were performed to characterize these viruses. These H5N2 viruses had undergone extensive reassortment resulting in two genetic groups of viruses in poultry. These viruses exhibited slightly pathogenicity in mice, and replicated without prior adaptation. The continued circulation of these novel H5N2 viruses may represent a threat to human health.
Highlights
The emergence of H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has caused severe epidemics among poultry and has resulted in large-scale economic losses worldwide (Li et al, 2004, 2010)
avian influenza viruses (AIVs) were isolated from 9.5% (119/1,250) of the swab samples
H5N2 viruses have not been detected in humans, previous studies have shown that the H5N2 subtype AIVs can infect people who are in frequent contact with infected birds and pigs, such as live poultry vendors, poultry farmers, and veterinarians (Ogata et al, 2008; Di Trani et al, 2012; Shafir et al, 2012; Wu et al, 2014c; Huang et al, 2015)
Summary
The emergence of H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has caused severe epidemics among poultry and has resulted in large-scale economic losses worldwide (Li et al, 2004, 2010). In China and Laos, a large population of poultry was infected with an H5N6 HPAI virus and resulted in poultry deaths (OIE, 2014; Wong et al, 2015). Since 2013, novel variants of H5N8 HPAI viruses have been isolated from poultry and wild birds in China (Wu et al, 2014b) and South Korea (Lee et al, 2014) in East Asia. These variants are co-circulating in many European countries (Adlhoch et al, 2014; Bouwstra et al, 2015) and North America (Jhung and Nelson, 2015; Lee et al, 2015)
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