What previous bird flu outbreaks teach us
Researchers at D-BSSE and colleagues have analysed the bird flu epidemic caused by the H7N9 strain that affected China from 2013 to 2017. New phylogenetic trees will help to improve monitoring of future bird flu epidemics.
There are many different bird flu viruses. Besides the subtype H5N1, which has been spreading in the European wild bird population for several years and poses a threat to local poultry farms, there is also, for instance, subtype H7N9. This one caused poultry outbreaks in China from 2013 to 2017 and also infected humans who had close contact with live poultry. A total of 616 people in China were reported to have died from an infection with this subtype.
Experts are tracking how the different bird flu viruses are developing. With both H7N9 and other subtypes, there is a risk that mutations in their genome could allow for human-to-human transmission, raising the threat of a pandemic.
That’s why Claire Guinat, a former postdoc in ETH Professor Tanja Stadler’s group, studied the waves of the H7N9 epidemic in China between 2013 and 2017. This involved the researchers analysing published gene sequences of H7N9 viruses isolated from infected humans and poultry to build phylogenetic trees. The researchers from the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich in Basel aimed to understand how the disease spread at poultry markets, and to draw conclusions that would help improve future efforts to monitor and control bird flu outbreaks.
Read on > full-length ETH News.
“It is important not to wait until bird flu cases are discovered, because then the virus has probably already been circulating for quite some time.”Tanja Stadler, Computational Evolution group, D-BSSE, ETH Zurich
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Learn about the Computational Evolution group led by Tanja Stadler.