New strain of coronavirus detected in Nigeria – News



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After the announcement, which was made this week with discretion, the African Center for Disease Control (CDC) – the African Union’s health agency – held an emergency meeting to analyze the new scenario, a published the agency this Sunday. AFP news.

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The new strain has been reported to the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (Acegid).

However, Professor Christian Happi, molecular biologist who participated in the genetic sequencing of this new variant, He asked that this discovery not be “extrapolated”, that is to say that one should not make hasty assumptions.

The African Center of Excellence for the Genomics of Infectious Diseases (Acegid) analyzed 200 samples of the virus in early December and two of them, taken from patients on August 3 and October 9, show genetic mutations.

“We have no idea or certainty whether this variant is directly related to the increase in cases Nigeria is currently experiencing.”, clarified the professor.

The country had more than 82,000 recorded cases on Saturday and 1,246 deaths, figures which are relatively low, but the number of tests carried out in the country is insignificant.

Thanks to the genetic sequencing of the virus, a very refined screening operation that only 12 laboratories on the African continent can perform, Professor Happi and his team were able to describe the evolution of the mutation.

“We don’t know where this new variant came from. We think it’s independent, that it’s produced in Nigeria. I don’t think it’s imported.”, underlined the biologist.

Happi, a former Harvard professor specializing in infectious diseases, recalled, however, that “Viruses mutate and change” naturally.

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“The important thing is not the mutation, but the transformation of the protein tip”, the part of the virus that allows access to the cells of the body, and which would make this mutation infectious, he explained.

Not enough research has been done so far and Acegid is working with the Nigerian Center for Infectious Diseases (NCDC), the national public health body, to try to explain the recent spike in Covid-19 cases and its it could be due to the new strain.

Yet one thing seems to be true: Nigeria’s relatively low death rate compared to Western countries has not increased in recent times.

“I ask people not to extrapolate. There is a tendency to extrapolate with these new variants of the virus,” said the professor. “Nothing shows us, for example, that the strain found in England would have the same effects in Nigeria” and vice versa.

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“If there’s anything Covid-19 taught us, it’s that in everything we thought we knew about this virus, we were wrong,” Happi recalls.

“Some have predicted that a third of the African population will die, but we cannot apply the research and figures gathered in Europe and the United States and apply them here: we are genetically different, our immune health is different,” he insisted.

For its part, African Union CDC Director Jhon Nkengasong asked for “time” to investigate rate of spread of new strain in Nigeria, during a videoconference from Addis Ababa.

For the time being, 2.4 million cases of coronavirus have been recorded in Africa, or 3.6% of the global total, according to an AFP count. In terms of deaths, more than 57,000 have been confirmed, less than in France (59,072), seventh in the global grid of deaths due to the disease.

The small number of diagnostic tests carried out could cast doubt on the statistics, but it is also true that no country has seen a peak in excess mortality, which would indicate a spread of the virus.

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