The new strain of IHU coronavirus has 46 mutations, which may or may not affect its infectivity. French specialists emphasize that there is little evidence that it displaces the currently dominant variant of the omicron, told PAP virologist Prof. Agnieszka Szuster-Ciesielska.
Professor Szuster-Ciesielska from the Department of Virology and Immunology at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin emphasized that mutations are responsible for altered proteins of this version of the coronavirus. «Some of them are also present in other variants of Beta, Gamma Theta and Omicron. It is true that in the case of IHU, there are two mutations that may be responsible for greater transmissibility (N501Y) and escape from an immune response (E484K), ”she said.
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“The new strain has 46 mutations, which may or may not have an impact on immune avoidance or its infectivity,” she said.
As she added, French specialists now emphasize that “there is little evidence that the IHU is replacing the currently dominant variant of the omicron, which accounts for over 60 percent. cases in France ». “The WHO will decide whether the IHU will be added to the group of variants of interest by naming it a letter of the Greek alphabet,” she stressed.
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“However, it is far too early to speculate on how the IHU will behave and what the real effectiveness of vaccines will be against it, especially since only 12 cases of IHU have been identified in France so far,” she concluded.
On December 10, 2021, a new coronavirus variant called IHU and deposited in the GISAID network as B.1.640.2 was discovered in patients from the town of Forcalquier in the Alpes de Haute Provence department at the Institute of Infectious Diseases of the University Hospital of Marseille. The arrival of the IHU in France has been linked to travels to the African Cameroon.
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