Human Herpesvirus 8, Southern Siberia | CDC EID

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Volume 16, Number 3–March 2010
Letter
Human Herpesvirus 8, Southern Siberia
Olivier Cassar, Sylviane Bassot, Sabine Plancoulaine, Lluis Quintana-Murci, Christine Harmant, Vladimir Gurtsevitch, Natalia B. Senyuta, Larissa S. Yakovleva, Guy de Thé, and Antoine Gessain
Author affiliations: Institut Pasteur, Paris, France (O. Cassar, S. Bassot, S. Plancoulaine, L. Quintana-Murci, G. de Thé, C. Harmant, A. Gessain); Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), Paris (S. Plancoulaine); Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris (L. Quintana-Murci); and Blokhin Cancer Research Center, Moscow, Russia (V. Gurtsevitch, N.B. Senyuta, L.S. Yakovleva)

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To the Editor: Human herpesvirus 8 (HHV-8) is the etiologic agent of Kaposi sarcoma. Sequence analysis of the highly variable open reading frame (ORF)–K1 of HHV-8 has enabled the identification of 5 main molecular subtypes, A–E (1). A and C subtypes are prevalent in persons in Europe, Mediterranean countries, northwestern China, and the United States; subtype B, in persons in sub-Saharan Africa; subtype D, in persons in the Pacific Islands and Japan (2–6); and subtype E, in Native Americans in the United States.

Considering that K1 gene polymorphisms of HHV-8–infected persons reflect the divergence accumulated during the early migrations of modern humans out of Africa (1), it is tempting to put the polymorphisms observed in the different subtypes into an evolutionary perspective with their geographic distribution. It is thought that Native Americans infected by subtype E and Pacific Islanders, including those infected by subtype D in the Japanese archipelago, originated from a common ancestral genetic stock in continental Asia. Because Siberia constitutes the geographic link between mainland Asia, North America, and the Pacific (Technical Appendix [ 811 KB, 4 pages]), it is likely that the Siberian region has served as a source or a corridor of human dispersals to these regions. Thus, we conducted a molecular epidemiology HHV-8 survey of the Buryat population, a major indigenous group in southern Siberia, to gain new insights into the origins, possibly common, of HHV-8 subtypes D and E.

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Suggested Citation for this Article
Cassar O, Bassot S, Plancoulaine S, Quintana-Murci L, Harmant C, Gurtsevitch V, et al. Human herpesvirus 8, southern Siberia [letter]. Emerg Infect Dis [serial on the Internet]. 2010 Mar [date cited]. http://www.cdc.gov/EID/content/16/3/580.htm

DOI: 10.3201/eid1603.091390