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Denmark and the United States are among six countries that have reported new cases of coronavirus related to mink farms, the World Health Organization said.
Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden are the other nations that have discovered SARS-CoV-2 in mink, the WHO said in a statement.
Denmark imposed strict measures in the north of the country after warning that a mutation of the virus had jumped from minks to humans and infected 12 people.
Copenhagen warned that the mutation could threaten the effectiveness of any future vaccines and ordered the slaughter of an estimated 15-17 million minks in the country.
Britain banned all non-resident aliens from Denmark after the mutation related to mink farms was found in humans.
Scientists say virus mutations are common and often harmless, and it does not cause more serious disease in humans.
But Danish health authorities have raised concerns that this strain, known as “Cluster 5,” is not inhibited by antibodies to the same degree as the normal virus, which they fear could threaten the efficacy of vaccines that are being developed around the world. the world.
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“Initial observations suggest that the clinical presentation, severity and transmission among those infected are similar to those of other circulating SARS-CoV-2 viruses,” the WHO statement said Friday.
“However, this variant … the ‘group 5’ variant, had a combination of mutations or changes that had not been previously observed. The implications of the changes identified in this variant are still not well understood,” warned WHO .
The UN agency said preliminary findings indicated that this mink-associated variant has “a moderately decreased sensitivity to neutralizing antibodies.”
The WHO called for more studies to verify the preliminary findings and “understand the possible implications of this finding in terms of diagnostics, therapies and vaccines in development.”
“Although the virus is believed to be ancestrally linked to bats, its origin and intermediate hosts for SARS-CoV-2 have not yet been identified,” the WHO noted.
Since June 2020, 214 human cases of Covid-19 have been identified in Denmark with variants of SARS-CoV-2 associated with farmed minks, including 12 cases with a unique variant, reported on November 5.
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