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. 2001 Jul-Aug;7(4):659–661. doi: 10.3201/eid0704.010410

West Nile encephalitis in Israel, 1999: the New York connection.

M Giladi 1, E Metzkor-Cotter 1, D A Martin 1, Y Siegman-Igra 1, A D Korczyn 1, R Rosso 1, S A Berger 1, G L Campbell 1, R S Lanciotti 1
PMCID: PMC2631756  PMID: 11585528

Abstract

We describe two cases of West Nile (WN) encephalitis in a married couple in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1999. Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction performed on a brain specimen from the husband detected a WN viral strain nearly identical to avian strains recovered in Israel in 1998 (99.9% genomic sequence homology) and in New York in 1999 (99.8%). This result supports the hypothesis that the 1999 WN virus epidemic in the United States originated from the introduction of a strain that had been circulating in Israel.

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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