| New variant found in the UK 09:58 - Feb 16 with 669 views | StokieBlue |
Another new variant has been found in the UK but there is some good news in that the new variants which are being discovered all have the E484K mutation. This is because it helps to avoid the antibody response of the body and because that is beneficial it's keeps arising as the virus tries to get around the defences put up against it.
The good news it that because the mutation is the same across these variants the tweaked vaccines should work on all of them once they become available (unless there are other mutations of course). It's also good that we now have such good genetic screening technology, 10 or 15 years ago these variants wouldn't be picked up as quickly and we would always be playing catch-up.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/15/32-cases-of-latest-covid-variant-o
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| New variant found in the UK on 10:31 - Feb 16 with 550 views | homer_123 |
Interesting piece on R4 about this yesterday.
They had Ravi Gupta (Professor of Clinical Microbiology at the Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Diseases) talking about the mutations.
He talked about how the mutations are happening (in short it is with patients that have a poor immune system that cannot get rid of the virus, the virus is spending so much time in the body that it learns to work around the body's immune system). He talked about a patient they were treating with lymphoma and because (as part of the treatment) they remove the B cells it greatly affects the immune system...said patient contracted the virus and they were able to go back to the samples they had (as this was all before the new variants were known) and look to see if the virus had mutated and it had.
That particular variant didn't get out into the wild as the patient was in isolation. What was clear though was how good this virus seems to be at mutating.
The other takeaway is the fact that for those with poor immune systems, we need isolation and restrictions to stay in place as it's clear that even with vaccinations some people cannot get rid of the virus fully and that's the perfect breading ground for mutations.
Still a long way to go though but certainly heading now in the right direction - as you say, currently E484K is the key.
Worth noting that we still are playing catch up but we are not as far behind as we would have been years ago. |  |
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| New variant found in the UK on 10:40 - Feb 16 with 518 views | Churchman |
On CNN they were saying 7 new mutations had been found there.
I think that the scary part is not what is being discovered in countries that have the technical capacity to identify new variants, but what is happening where there is limited or zero capability. That includes countries with large remote areas like Brazil and Mexico and those that bury the bad news like China |  | | |
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