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Review
. 2024 Sep 12;12(9):1044.
doi: 10.3390/vaccines12091044.

Recent Occurrence, Diversity, and Candidate Vaccine Virus Selection for Pandemic H5N1: Alert Is in the Air

Yordanka Medina-Armenteros  1 , Daniela Cajado-Carvalho  1 , Ricardo das Neves Oliveira  1 , Milena Apetito Akamatsu  1 , Paulo Lee Ho  1
Affiliations
Review

Recent Occurrence, Diversity, and Candidate Vaccine Virus Selection for Pandemic H5N1: Alert Is in the Air

Yordanka Medina-Armenteros et al. Vaccines (Basel). .

Abstract

The prevalence of the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1 in wild birds that migrate all over the world has resulted in the dissemination of this virus across Asia, Europe, Africa, North and South America, the Arctic continent, and Antarctica. So far, H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4.b has reached an almost global distribution, with the exception of Australia and New Zealand for autochthonous cases. H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4.b, derived from the broad-host-range A/Goose/Guangdong/1/96 (H5N1) lineage, has evolved, adapted, and spread to species other than birds, with potential mammal-to-mammal transmission. Many public health agencies consider H5N1 influenza a real pandemic threat. In this sense, we analyzed H5N1 hemagglutinin sequences from recent outbreaks in animals, clinical samples, antigenic prototypes of candidate vaccine viruses, and licensed human vaccines for H5N1 with the aim of shedding light on the development of an H5N1 vaccine suitable for a pandemic response, should one occur in the near future.

Keywords: A (H5) non-A (H5N1) candidate vaccine virus; A (H5N1) candidate vaccine virus; H5 hemagglutinin; H5N1 pandemic preparedness; HPAI H5N1 virus; pandemic H5N1 epizootic.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript; or in the decision to publish the results.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Influenza A (H5N1) lethality in humans by clade. Influenza A (H5N1) lethality in humans by clade (numbers in white). The colored sectors indicate the fraction of total cases (N = 30) in each clade: 2.3.2.1a (orange; N = 2), 2.3.2.1c (red; N = 11), 2.3.4.4b (blue; N = 15), and not reported (gray; N = 2). The percentages in each sector show the percent mortality relative to the number of cases in each clade. The period of analysis was from July 2021 to June 2024.
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