The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday that it is tracking the recently discovered new coronavirus strain BA.2.86 after experts found a case of the highly mutated strain in Michigan.
“Today, we are better prepared than ever to detect and respond to changes in the novel coronavirus. Scientists are now better able to understand the newly identified strains in these four cases. We are working to do so and will share more information as it becomes available,” the CDC said. spokeswoman Kathleen Conley said in a statement to CBS News.
This comes after the World Health Organization announced that it had classified BA.2.86 as a ‘variant under surveillance’ due to its high mutation count.
The rapid expansion of this strain into the WHO ‘variant under surveillance’ category is unusual. Only four cases of this variant have been identified worldwide.Virus tracker is officially here Designated Stocks as BA.2.86 are within 1 day.
It’s too early to tell if subspecies are more dangerous than subspecies. Stocks currently in circulation of virus.United Nations agency To tell While more data is needed to understand the potential threat BA.2.86 poses, its sheer number of changes has accelerated classification.
Dozens of genetic alterations in this strain — an evolutionary leap equivalent to the emergence of the original Omicron subspecies in 2021 — have raised eyebrows among virologists as cases begin to emerge worldwide. ing. Its mutations include several changes in key parts of the virus that may allow it to successfully evade the body’s immunity from previous infections and vaccinations.
Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hatch Cancer Center, said, “Further mutational scans show that the BA.2.86 variant can be derived from antibodies induced by pre- and first-generation Omicron variants to XBB.1.5. It was shown to have an evasiveness equal to or greater than that of Said In a slide deck published Thursday.
XBB.1.5 is a descendant subspecies of many recent strains, and Food and Drug Administration officials previously selected Announced XBB.1.5 as a vaccine target strain Booster shots this fall.
According to Bloom, BA.2.86 has 36 mutations compared to the XBB.1.5 variant.
Experts say reports of BA.2.86 have also been found in countries on three different continents: Denmark, Israel and the United States. suggest At least it had the ability to transmit over a wide area and may have spread undetected for some time.
The first US case of BA.2.86 was report By a lab at the University of Michigan. The samples were sequenced by the university’s clinical microbiology laboratory during “baseline surveillance,” according to the records attached to the sequences uploaded to GISAID, a global virus database.
It is unclear whether the samples were collected from hospitalized patients in the university-run health care system or from another source.
A spokeswoman for the University of Michigan School of Medicine declined to comment on the possible origin of the sequence, leaving it to the Michigan Department of Health to decide. A spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In Denmark, health authorities To tell They are now working on culturing the virus, an important step in further assessing the threat posed by the highly mutated strain.Two incidents found there had He had “no epidemiological link” and was not immunocompromised.
Tracking the spread of novel coronavirus variants BA.2.86 and EG.5
For now, experts say BA.2.86 needs to prove that it can compete with other variants of the XBB Omicron variant, which is already spreading rapidly around the world, in order to surpass the world. there is “Scientific curiosity”.
one XBB descendant, A variant called EG.5At the time of the CDC, the number of infected people nationwide had already risen to nearly one in five. Estimate It was published earlier this month.
A new forecast is due to be released by the CDC on Friday. According to the agency, BA.2.86 will remain integrated with its distant parent, the Omicron subspecies known as BA.2, until the weighted estimate reaches 1% prevalence.
The strain’s emergence comes as the pharmaceutical company prepares to deploy New coronavirus vaccine will be inoculated next month It targets the XBB strain of the virus, which is closely related to EG.5.Moderna announced On Thursday, it announced that preliminary clinical trial data from New Shot confirmed a “significant increase in neutralizing antibodies” for EG.5.
They may face setbacks if BA.2.86 is able to achieve more widespread adoption. Bloom said he believes the strain change poses enough of a risk that a vaccine targeting XBB will be “very poorly fit” against BA.2.86.
But he stressed that BA.2.86 remains rare at this point, and that other built-in defenses in the body may still be working to ward off highly mutated variants.
”[T]There are also extensive immune mechanisms induced by vaccination and infection that provide some protection against severe disease, even in very highly mutated variants,” he said by email. told CBS News.
