A new strain of avian flu, similar to the infectious virus that has triggered past pandemic fears, has been discovered by scientists in Russia after an outbreak of a previously unknown disease in the country’s south.
On Saturday, Anna Popova, the head of health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor told journalists that experts at the Vector Institute in Siberia had “isolated genetic material” from a new influenza variant.
The samples they tested came from seven employees of a poultry farm in southern Russia, which registered a bird flu outbreak in December last year.
