World Health Organization said that the new COVID variant, which was limited to France only, was on their radar since the end of last year.
Since it was initially identified in November, a coronavirus variation isolated in France hasn’t posed much of a threat, according to the World Health Organization.
Abdi Mahamud, a WHO incident manager on Covid, said the variant “had been on our radar” at a press briefing in Geneva on Tuesday.
“There were a lot of opportunities for the infection to propagate.”
It contains 46 mutations, according to experts, making it more immune to vaccines more infectious than Omicron. So far, 12 cases have been detected near Marseille, the first of which was linked to a trip to Africa’s Cameroon.
According to tests, the strain has the N501Y mutation, which was first discovered in the Alpha variety and is expected to make it more transmissible. According to the researchers, it also has the E484K mutation, which could make the IHU form more vaccine resistant. The World Health Organization has yet to discover it in other countries or designate it as a research variant.
Around the same time that omicron was discovered in South Africa last year, the variant was discovered in 12 people in the southern Alps. Unlike the French variant, which researchers at the IHU Mediterranee Infection — lead by scientist Didier Raoult — called IHU — the latter has since spanned the globe and sparked unprecedented levels of transmission.
IHU researchers noted in an article published on the medRxiv server in late December that the first patient found with the variation was vaccinated and had recently returned from Cameroon.
They said in the report, which hasn’t been peer reviewed, that it’s “too early to speculate on virological, epidemiological, or clinical aspects of this IHU variation based on these 12 cases.”
When Raoult recommended hydroxychloroquine treatment in the early phases of the pandemic, he sparked debate.
The WHO keeps track of a variety of variants and designates them “variants of concern” when they appear to represent a serious risk. This is a case that is still being looked into.
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