a new variant, which “is actively circulating” in France, discovered at Henri-Mondor hospital in Créteil

After the English, Brazilian, South African, Californian, New York and Breton variants, here is the variant “Henri-mondor», Named after the hospital located in Créteil, in Val-de-Marne. The Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP), to which the establishment belongs, announced its discovery in a press release published on Tuesday, March 30, specifying that “is now actively circulating in France».

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«It is characterized by the presence of 2 deletions and 18 amino acid mutations, of which 7 to 8 are located at key positions of the protein “spike””, Says the AP-HP. First identified “within a cluster made up of three hospital professionals and the spouse of one of them», This French variant was then detected in 29 patients from Île-de-France, the south-east and south-west of France. “Its detection frequency continued to increase with the identification of several clusters and it is increasingly found in samples tested by the Henri-Mondor AP-HP hospital platform.», Up to representing, according to a Flash survey of March 2, 1.8% of the strains sequenced on the national territory.

For the moment, nothing indicates that this variant “Henri-mondorIs more, as much or less contagious than other known variants. “New studies will be needed to find out if it is associated with clinical forms of different severity, and if its sensitivity to the action of antiviral treatments and vaccine protection is impaired by the presence of its many mutations.», We can read. The discovery of this variant, carried out by the Henri-Mondor hospital, Inserm and the University of Paris-Est Créteil, was the subject of a publication in the newspaper Emerging Infectious Diseases .

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