A new variant of COVID has been identified a few weeks ago by French researchers, derived from another whose first cases had been detected in the Republic of Congo last September.
The University Hospital Institute of Marseille, at the origin of this discovery, communicated on December 9 on its Twitter account that it had baptized this variant with its own acronym, IHU.
Its researchers published at the end of last month a pre-study, still pending validation by their peers, on this “IHU variant” called B.1.640.2 of which quite little is still known, taking into account the limited number of registered cases. .
According to this center specialized in infectious diseases, created and directed by the controversial doctor Didier Raoult, the first of these cases found by scientists occurred in the town of Forcalquier, in the department of Alpes de Haute Provence.
A dozen are known to be associated with trips to Cameroon in the Marseille region.
This variant contains 46 mutations, that is to say even more than omicron, and is one of the two derivatives of B.1.640 that had been located at the end of September in the Republic of Congo.
A peculiar element of the “IHU variant is that one of its mutations is associated with a possible increase in the transmission of the virus.
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