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 announced. "The infectiousness of this variant, as well as its other characteristics, are currently unknown, as is the case with 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 before has it been identified in Italy," the statement reads.
"A professional returning from a trip to Africa tested positive for COVID-19 after a swab test. Thanks to the collaboration between the laboratories at Federico II and Pascale, Giuseppe Portella of Federico II identified the highly suspicious case, and very quickly, Nicola Normanno's team at Pascale discovered a COVID-XNUMX variant never before described in Italy," the statement reads. "The sequence of the sample sent to us from the Policlinico Federiciano," explains the researcher from the Naples Cancer Institute, "immediately aroused our suspicions because it showed no similarities with other samples from our region. After a comparison with the team from the Emerging Zoonoses Unit of the Istituto Superiore di Sanita, we confirmed that it is a variant described so far in around a hundred cases in some European and African countries, as well as in the United States. We immediately filed the sequence in the international GISAID database and notified the health authorities." All the required procedures, starting with contact tracing, were immediately initiated.
"This is a discovery of extraordinary scientific value, a timely and extremely useful result, which confirms the importance of having funded these studies, the need for the government to adopt extraordinary national measures to avoid undermining the vaccination program, which is fully underway, and which makes the supply of vaccines needed to combat the epidemic even more essential."
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Campania Governor Vincenzo De Luca commented in a statement on researchers' identification of a new variant of COVID-19 in Naples. "The Campania Region's commitment to high-level scientific research on the coronavirus continues," the statement from the Region emphasizes. "The Pascale Institute and Federico II University, thanks to funding allocated by the Region and which is leading to results of outstanding scientific value thanks to Campania's excellence in medical research, have identified another variant of COVID-XNUMX, never before identified in Italy."
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