Until last week, we (Nuno Faria and myself) thought there were no genetic sequences for the current outbreak of Yellow fever virus in Angola. However over lunch at the Sanger Institute, George Gao (China CDC) mentioned that a recent traveller who had returned from Angola to China had been diagnosed with YFV and that the sequence had been placed on GenBank. We think this is accession number KX010994. The GenBank entry says it was an imported case but does not mention Angola, so we can’t be 100% sure yet of its source. Thank you China CDC for publicly sharing data so quickly.
Here’s a provisional tree from Nuno that shows the Chinese import sequence (red). It groups strongly with the only other known Angola sequence (blue) from 1971, within the “East Africa” genotype. One interpretation of this is that YFV has been circulating undetected in Angola for 30-40 years!