It has been only weeks since South Africa released the Omicron variant to the world and now French researchers are releasing “IHU”. So far there are only 12 cases in the world, all of them reside in the southeast of France.
Origin of the investigation
The University Hospital Institute of Infectious Diseases (IHU) de Marseille, announced the news on December 9, where they indicated that they baptized this variant with their own initials.
The “IHU variant” call B.1.640.2 has a limited number of registered cases and they indicate that it has 46 mutations, that is, more than omicron.
This new variant was located in the Republic of the Congo in September last year. “One of its mutations is associated with a possible increase in the transmission of the virus”, acotó AFP.
The first case
The recent discovery began to worry the world, especially because of the confusion it could cause with omicron, the dominant strain at the moment.
In a scientific journal article in medRxiv se notes that this new strain was identified in a French adult who traveled to Cameroon, in West Africa. Three days later he returned to France and had mild respiratory problems.
The nasopharyngeal sample showed an atypical combination that did not respond to the omicron or delta pattern. It is there that the samples were sent to a laboratory.
Sampling response?
Dr. Phillipe Colson, from the IHU Mediterranée Infection Institute in Mrsella, commented to the media Independent that the first reports speak of 46 mutations in the new variant, which could make it more resistant to vaccines due to the E484K mutation and more transmissible due to the N501Y mutation.
Even so, the specialist calls for calm, as there are still not many epidemiological characteristics of the variants, since the reported case is insufficient for a larger study.
WHO on IHU
The World Health Organization (WHO) has not yet placed IHU as a variant under investigation, case totally contrary to omicron.
This was pointed out by the doctor Maria Van Kerkhove, a leading epidemiologist at the WHO, who told Europa Press that they are observing the variant, but clarified that “It is not circulating very actively.”
“This variant represents less than 1 percent of the samples in France. There are two subvariants: B.1.640.1 and B.1.640.2, and it is important that we follow them, due to the amount of mutations it has, but it is not circulating very actively ”, commented.
At the moment, the IHU variant is under scrutiny, but behind the shadow of omicron, a strain that has conquered the world and promotes new waves of the disease in different parts of the world.
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