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HHS: No H5N1 strain found in U.S. so far

15th Nov 2006, 02:04 GMT

No cases of the H5N1 flu strain have been found in the more than 35,000 migratory birds the Interior and Agriculture departments and state partners have tested in the United States in the past year, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said Nov. 13 in an update to the U.S. pandemic plan released last November. The strain has not been found anywhere in the Americas, he added. But the fact that no birds have been found with H5N1 "should not make us complacent," Leavitt said. "While there is no way to know when, or even if, the H5N1 virus will form a variant capable of widespread human-to-human transmission, we know pandemics are inevitable." To better understand avian flu, Leavitt said the international Influenza Genome Sequencing Project, supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has set up a production line to sequence 500 to 1,000 flu strains a year, with each sequence 13,000 letters long. The institute said the project has so far completed genome sequencing for 1,695 human and avian flu strains in less than two years...

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