"similar strain" is correct and can be used in written English.
You can use it any time you want to describe something similar to another thing in terms of difficulty, impact, similarity, etc. For example, "This flu season has been particularly hard on the elderly due to a similar strain that also affects the elderly disproportionately."
The co-flow experimental flame and the counter-flow theoretical flame at similar strain rates and fuel richness showed significant similarities.
"I remember hearing about the way he was thinking about going to Vietnam, and there's a similar strain in how he's open to religious faith," she said.
This is what experts think happened 87 years ago when a similar strain of bird flu - misleadingly known as Spanish influenza - engulfed the world with catastrophic consequences.
A similar strain runs through "Last of the Leaves," set to John Adams's "Shaker Loops," in which eight dancers examine the cycle of life.
The play premiered the year before the first TV series of Monty Python's Flying Circus and comes from a similar strain of populist English surrealism, combining intellectualism and silliness.
My agreeable middle-aged roommate in the British Security Service, better known as M.I.5, was, I think, afflicted by a similar strain of the disease, although the symptoms in his case were different.
A similar strain of self-denial runs through this latest offering from Mr. Kushner, the prodigiously talented dramatist whose award-wreathed "Angels in America" has been adapted as a movie for HBO, with a premiere on Sunday.
Might India's economy suffer a similar strain in 2008?Optimists argue that the Indian economy is laying the foundations for a long stay at the crease.
(A similar strain marks Murray's dark and twisted 2004 novel, "A Carnivore's Inquiry," which takes frequent detours into historical and mythological accounts of cannibals).
The next step was winnowing the data for each suspect animal or human population based on two things: were they arriving from a place with the most similar strain of the virus, and what were the odds that they could have been harboring live virus in their blood when they got here?
In 2013, researchers in China discovered colistin-resistant E. coli in the intestine of a pig, and a few weeks ago a similar strain was found in a patient in Pennsylvania prompting the head of the Centers for Disease Control to declare that "the end of the road isn't very far away for antibiotics".
