Abstract
West Nile virus is widespread in southern Russia, where the fever appears annually. Since Western Kazakhstan borders on southern Russia, we examined mosquitoes in this region for the presence of West Nile virus. Virus was detected in a small proportion of Culex modestus mosquitoes (3/239 pools) and isolates are related to strains from Volgograd, Russia. A screen for West Nile virus IgG was conducted and ~5% of the local human population tested positive.
Highlights
West Nile Virus (WNV) is a virus of arthropods that is classified within the Flaviviridae family
Mosquitoes were collected from 11 districts of the West Kazakhstan Oblast (WKO) and were identified by experienced entomologists, using Kazakh local morphology criteria
Comparing the Kazakh virus amino acid sequences with other strains in the NCBI database, it is clear that viruses from the WKO have a close relationship to strains from Volgograd
Summary
West Nile Virus (WNV) is a virus of arthropods that is classified within the Flaviviridae family. It is a member of the Japanese encephalitis virus (JE) virus group, whose members include Japanese encephalitis virus, Saint Louis encephalitis virus (SLE) and Murray Valley encephalitis virus (MVE) [1]. In 2018, for example, southern and southeastern Europe saw a large increase in cases; a plausible cause for this is climate change, with early Spring and a hot Summer leading to increased mosquito activity [9,10,11]
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