[ad_1]
Brazil identified its first two cases of patients infected with the British strain of covid-19, which appears to be 70% more contagious than other variants, through tests carried out by a private laboratory in Sao Paulo.
The Dasa diagnostic laboratory reported that this Thursday it detected that two people who had contracted coronavirus, and who underwent tests in their units in the city of Sao Paulo, were infected with the same variety of Sars-CoV-2 that emerged in the United Kingdom.
Dasa reported that it has already communicated the results of its examinations to the Secretariat of Health Surveillance and to the Adolfo Lutz Institute, one of the Brazilian institutions of reference in studies on the coronavirus.
The Adolfo Lutz Institute confirmed that is investigating both cases and that it began the tests to establish the genetic sequence of the strains and to confirm if it is the one that initially emerged in the United Kingdom.
The so-called British variant, baptized as B.1.1.7, has already been registered in at least 17 countries and is characterized by a mutation that it affects the way the virus attaches itself to human cells, making it much more contagious.
Although it has generated alarm in countries like the United Kingdom due to its high contagion capacity, so far there is no evidence that this strain causes more severe cases of the disease, which increases the mortality rate of the virus or is resistant to existing vaccines.
The leading private laboratory in Brazil for diagnostic medicine, reported that the samples in which it detected the British strain were collected in mid-December, precisely when the United Kingdom published the first scientific information on the variant.
Dasa said he had made the genetic sequence of 400 saliva samples collected in RT-PCR tests and detected the British strain in two of them.
“The sequence confirmed that the new virus strain arrived in Brazil. Given its high transmission power, this result reinforces the importance of the authorities imposing quarantine on those who arrive from abroad, ”said Ester Sabino, a researcher at the University of Sao Paulo (USP) and one of those responsible for identifying the two cases of the British strain in the country.
Brazil began requiring diagnostic tests of the RT-PCR type on Wednesday to passengers who disembark at any airport in the country from abroad, but until now It has not imposed any kind of quarantine on travelers.
The detection of the first two infected with the British strain in Brazil occurs at a time when the country accumulates close to 194 thousand deaths from coronavirus and 7,619,200 infections, which confirm Brazil, with its 210 million inhabitants, as one of the global epicenters of the pandemic.
Brazil is the second country with the most deaths from covid in the world after the United States and the third with the most cases after the United States and India, and the figures tend to grow with the registration of the second wave.
[ad_2]
