Rapid Emergence of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Subtypes from a Subtype H5N1 Hemagglutinin Variant - Volume 21, Number 5—May 2015 - Emerging Infectious Disease journal - CDC

full-text ►

Rapid Emergence of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Subtypes from a Subtype H5N1 Hemagglutinin Variant - Volume 21, Number 5—May 2015 - Emerging Infectious Disease journal - CDC

Volume 21, Number 5—May 2015

Dispatch

Rapid Emergence of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Subtypes from a Subtype H5N1 Hemagglutinin Variant

On This Page

• The Study
• Conclusion
• Suggested Citation

Figures

• Figure 1
• Figure 2

Tables

• Table

Downloads

• PDF[1.22 MB - 7 pgs]
• RIS[TXT - 2 KB]

Erik de Vries , Hongbo Guo1, Meiling Dai1, Peter J.M. Rottier, Frank J.M. van Kuppeveld, and Cornelis A.M. de Haan

Author affiliations: Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Suggested citation for this article

Abstract

In 2014, novel highly pathogenic avian influenza A H5N2, H5N5, H5N6, and H5N8 viruses caused outbreaks in Asia, Europe, and North America. The H5 genes of these viruses form a monophyletic group that evolved from a clade 2.3.4 H5N1 variant. This rapid emergence of new H5Nx combinations is unprecedented in the H5N1 evolutionary history.

A highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) A(H5N1) virus (A/goose/Guangdong/1/1996) was first detected in China in 1996. Multiple clades, defined by phylogenetic characterization of the H5 hemagglutinin (HA) (1), have evolved and spread across Asia, Africa, and Europe, causing enormous losses to the poultry industry. A total of 694 human infections (death rate 58%) were recorded during 2003–2014 (2).

During the evolution of HPAI H5N1 viruses, reassortment events involving the 6 internal gene segments have often been detected (reviewed in [3]), but novel subtypes (i.e., combinations of HPAI H5 with other N subtypes) have rarely been isolated. In 2014, a novel highly virulent reassortant HPAI H5N6 virus (4) caused multiple outbreaks in Southeast Asia and 1 lethal human infection, which led the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations to issue a warning (5). Outbreaks of novel HPAI H5N8 virus in South Korea (6,7), China (8), and Japan raised further concern, and in November 2014, this subtype emerged outside Eastern Asia, causing outbreaks in poultry farms in Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.

Acknowledgment

We gratefully acknowledge the authors and originating and submitting laboratories of the sequences from the GISAID EpiFlu Database, on which part of this research is based. All submitters of data may be contacted directly via the GISAID website (http://www.gisaid.org).

References

1. World Health Organization/World Organisation for Animal Health/Food and Agriculture Organization (WHO/OIE/FAO). Revised and updated nomenclature for highly pathogenic avian influenza A (H5N1) viruses. Influenza Other Respir Viruses. 2014;8:384–8. PubMed
2. World Health Organization. Cumulative number of confirmed human cases for avian influenza A(H5N1) reported to WHO, 2003–2015 [cited 2015 Jan 19]. http://www.who.int/influenza/human_animal_interface/EN_GIP_20150106CumulativeNumberH5N1cases.pdf?ua=1
3. Lei F, Shi W. Prospective of genomics in revealing transmission, reassortment and evolution of wildlife-borne avian influenza A (H5N1) viruses. Curr Genomics. 2011;12:466–74. DOIPubMed
4. Qi X, Cui L, Yu H, Ge Y, Tang F. Whole-genome sequence of a reassortant H5N6 avian influenza virus isolated from a live poultry market in China, 2013. Genome Announc. 2014;2:e00706–14.
5. FAO warns of new strain of avian influenza virus. Vet Rec. 2014;175:343. DOIPubMed
6. Ku KB, Park EH, Yum J, Kim JA, Oh SK, Seo SH. Highly pathogenic avian influenza A(H5N8) virus from waterfowl, South Korea, 2014. Emerg Infect Dis. 2014;20:1587–8. DOIPubMed
7. Lee YJ, Kang HM, Lee EK, Song BM, Jeong J, Kwon YK, Novel reassortant influenza A(H5N8) viruses, South Korea, 2014. Emerg Infect Dis.2014;20:1087–9. DOIPubMed
8. Wu H, Peng X, Xu L, Jin C, Cheng L, Lu X, Novel reassortant influenza A(H5N8) viruses in domestic ducks, eastern China. Emerg Infect Dis.2014;20:1315–8. DOIPubMed
9. Edgar RC. MUSCLE: multiple sequence alignment with high accuracy and high throughput. Nucleic Acids Res. 2004;32:1792–7. DOIPubMed
10. Bao Y, Bolotov P, Dernovoy D, Kiryutin B, Zaslavsky L, Tatusova T, The influenza virus resource at the National Center for Biotechnology Information. J Virol. 2008;82:596–601. DOIPubMed
11. World Health Organization. Evolution of the influenza A(H5) haemagglutinin: WHO/OIE/FAO H5 Working Group reports a new clade designated 2.3.4.4 [cited 2015 Jan 19]. http://www.who.int/influenza/gisrs_laboratory/h5_nomenclature_clade2344/en/
12. Liu CG, Liu M, Liu F, Lv R, Liu DF, Qu LD, Emerging multiple reassortant H5N5 avian influenza viruses in ducks, China, 2008. Vet Microbiol.2013;167:296–306. DOIPubMed
13. Zhao K, Gu M, Zhong L, Duan Z, Zhang Y, Zhu Y, Characterization of three H5N5 and one H5N8 highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses in China.Vet Microbiol. 2013;163:351–7 and. DOIPubMed
14. Gu M, Huang J, Chen Y, Chen J, Wang X, Liu X. Genome sequence of a natural reassortant H5N2 avian influenza virus from domestic mallard ducks in eastern China. J Virol. 2012;86:12463–4 . DOIPubMed
15. Zhao G, Gu X, Lu X, Pan J, Duan Z, Zhao K, Novel reassortant highly pathogenic H5N2 avian influenza viruses in poultry in China. PLoS ONE.2012;7:e46183 . DOIPubMed

Figures

• Figure 1. Phylogenetic tree showing the evolutionary history of the hemagglutinin (HA) proteins of novel highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5 HA subtype viruses. By using MUSCLE (9), we aligned the......
• Figure 2. Hemagglutinin protein tree (neighbor-joining, point accepted mutation distance matrix model) of subtypes present in branch descending from highly pathogenic avian influenza A(H5N1) cluster 2.3.4 (see Figure 1). MUSCLE...

Table

• Table. Details for GISAID-derived sequences of the hemagglutinin genome segment of various influenza A(H5) subtype viruses descended from a highly pathogenic avian A(H5N1) virus hemagglutinin variant

Suggested citation for this article: de Vries E, Guo H, Dai M, Rottier PJM, van Kuppeveld FJM, de Haan CAM. Rapid emergence of highly pathogenic avian influenza subtypes from a subtype H5N1 hemagglutinin variant. Emerg Infect Dis. 2015 May [date cited]. http://dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid2105.141927

DOI: 10.3201/eid2105.141927

1These authors contributed equally to this article.