Covid-19: As Omicron spreads, French variant IHU, not a threat yet, says WHO
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: The global health watchdog has said the new coronavirus variant found in France is not a threat yet, although it affects the upper respiratory tract, causing milder symptoms than previous variants of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
On Tuesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said a new variant, tentatively called IHU and found in France, has not yet become much of a threat since it was first identified in November. It “has been on our radar,” Abdi Mahamud, a WHO incident manager on Covid-19, told reporters in Geneva on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, amid India facing a “Third Wave” of infections with soaring numbers, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has approved a testing kit for detecting the Omicron variant. The kit, called “OmiSure”, has been manufactured by Tata Medical and Diagnostics and is compatible with all standard Real-Time PCR Machines.
The company’s head of R&D, Ravi Vasanthapuram, said the kit can detect Omicron and other variants. Currently, Omicron patients are detected only after genome sequencing. But this test can help eliminate that step and detection can be done during the testing.
The test run time of this kit is 85 minutes. The result turnaround time, including sample collection and RNA extraction, is 130 minutes, he said.
Cases of Omicron, which the WHO classified as ‘Variant of Concern’, have been surging in India and across the globe. By Wednesday morning, a total of 2,135 cases of the Omicron variant were detected across 24 states and UTs, out of which, 828 recovered or migrated, according to the Union health ministry data.
In France, they identified the IHU variant in 12 people in the southern Alps around the same time that Omicron was discovered in South Africa in November 2021. Omicron has since fanned out across the globe and propelled infection numbers multi-fold. Its French counterpart, which researchers at the IHU Mediterranee Infection — helmed by scientist Didier Raoult –nicknamed ‘IHU’, has remained mild.
The first patient identified with the IHU strain was vaccinated and had just returned from Cameroon. It is “too early to speculate on virological, epidemiological or clinical features of this IHU variant based on these 12 cases,” they wrote in the article, which has not been peer-reviewed so far.
But Omicron is causing concern. The most contagious variant yet, it is affecting the upper respiratory tract, causing milder symptoms than previous variants.
“We are seeing more and more studies pointing out that Omicron is infecting the upper part of the body, unlike the other ones, that could cause severe pneumonia”, Mahamud said, adding it could be “good news”.
However, he added that Omicron’s high transmissibility means it will become dominant within weeks in many places, posing a threat in countries where a high portion of the population remains unvaccinated.
