"Bird Flu Virus is Spreading Westward

Newswise — In a paper in the May issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases, an international team of researchers report the first ever large-scale sequencing of western genomes of the deadly avian influenza virus, H5N1.
 
Their study of 36 genomes of the virus collected from wild birds in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMA), and Vietnam confirms not only that the virus has very recently spread west from Asia, but that two of the new western strains have already independently combined, or “reassorted,” to create a new strain.