Bird flu spread pattern


A highly pathogenic strain of H5N1 caused flu outbreaks with significant spread to numerous farms, resulting in great economic losses in 1959 in Scotland in chickens and in 1991 in England in turkeys.[4] These strains were somewhat similar to the current pathogenic strain of H5N1 in two of its ten genes, the gene that causes it to be type H5 and the gene that causes it to be N1. The other genes can and have been reasserted from other subtypes of the bird flu species (their ease at exchanging genes is part of what makes them all one species). Evolution by reassortment of H5N1 from 1999 to 2002 created the Z genotype which became the dominant strain of highly pathogenic H5N1 in 2004 and is now spreading across the entire world in both wild and domestic birds.


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