A new variant of covid has been identified a few weeks ago by French researchers in their country, derived from another whose first cases had been detected in the Republic of the Congo last September.
“It is too early to speculate on the virological, epidemiological or clinical characteristics of this variant based on 12 cases,” the researchers point out in a pre-publication.
A new variant of covid has been identified a few weeks ago by French researchers in their country, derived from another whose first cases had been detected in the Republic of the Congo last September.
The University Hospital Institute of Marseille, at the origin of this discovery, announced on December 9 on its Twitter account that it had named this variant with its own acronym, IHU.
At the end of last month, its researchers published a pre-study, still pending validation by their peers, on this ’IHU variant’ called B.1.640.2, about which quite little is still known taking into account the limited number of registered cases. .
12 cases identified
“It is too early to speculate on the virological, epidemiological or clinical characteristics of this variant based on 12 cases,” the authors acknowledge in the pre-publication.
According to this center specialized in infectious diseases, created and directed by the controversial doctor Didier Raoult, [promoter of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment against covid despite scientific evidence against it], the first localized UHI cases occurred in the town of Forcalquier, in the department of Alpes-de-Haute-Provence.
This new variant has 46 mutations, still more than omicron, and is one of the two derived from B.1.640 that had been located in September in the Republic of the Congo.
At the moment, there are a dozen cases in the Marseille region that are associated with trips to Cameroon.
A peculiar element of the new variant is that one of its mutations is associated with a possible increase in the transmission of the virus, but this and other aspects of IHU continue to be investigated.
