After the English, Brazilian, South African, Californian, New York and Breton variants, here is the “
Henri-Mondor
”
variant
, 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 it "
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“
spike
”
protein,”
says 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 of France. East and South-West of France.
"
Its detection frequency continued to increase with the identification of several clusters and it is more and more frequently found in samples tested by the Henri-Mondor AP-HP hospital platform
", to represent, according to a Flash survey of March 2, 1.8% of strains sequenced on national territory.
For the moment, nothing indicates that this “
Henri-Mondor
”
variant
is more, as much or less contagious than the other known variants.
"
Further studies will be necessary to find out whether it is associated with clinical forms of different severity, and whether its sensitivity to the action of antiviral treatments and to vaccine protection is impaired by the presence of its numerous mutations
", perhaps we 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 journal
Emerging Infectious Diseases
.