Naples. “The Pascale Institute and the Federico II University have identified another Covid-19 variant, never identified before in Italy”.
This is what the Campania Region has announced. “At the moment, the infection power of this variant is not known, nor its other characteristics, as is the case for many rare variants of the virus. It is called B.1.525, and so far only 32 cases have been identified in Great Britain, and a few cases also in Nigeria, Denmark and the United States. Never so far in Italy”, the note reads.
“A professional returning from a trip to Africa, after the swab, tested positive for Covid 19. Thanks to the collaboration between the laboratories of Federico II and Pascale, Giuseppe Portella of Federico II identified the highly suspicious case and in a very short time Nicola Normanno's team of Pascale discovered a Covid variant never described before in Italy”, we read in the note. “The sequence of the sample that came to us from the Policlinico Federiciano – explains the researcher of the Institute of Tumors of Naples – immediately aroused our suspicions because it did not present analogies with other samples from our region. After a comparison with the group of the Emerging Zoonoses Department of the Istituto Superiore di Sanita' we had confirmation that it is a variant described so far in about a hundred cases in some European and African countries, but also in the United States. We immediately deposited the sequence in the international database GISAID and notified the health authorities”. In fact, all the expected procedures were immediately started, starting with contact tracing”.
“This is a discovery of extraordinary scientific value, a timely and very useful result, which confirms the importance of having financed these studies, the need for the Government to adopt extraordinary national measures so as not to frustrate the vaccination program that is fully underway, and which makes the supplies of the vaccines needed to deal with the epidemic even more indispensable”.
The governor of Campania, Vincenzo De Luca, comments in this way, in a note, on the identification in Naples by researchers of a new variant of Covid. "The commitment of the Campania Region aimed at high scientific research on the coronavirus continues - underlines the note from the Region -. The Pascale Institute and the Federico II University, thanks to the funds allocated by the Region and which are leading to results of absolute scientific value thanks to the excellence of Campania in the field of medical research, have identified another variant of Covid-19, never identified before in Italy".
Article published on 16 February 2021 - 21:04
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