2023-09-25 15:32:00
The BA.2.86 variant of Sars-CoV-2, renamed Pirola on social media, has arrived in Italy. The Covid variant was isolated in Brescia by the team of Arnaldo Caruso, president of the Italian Society of Virology (Siv-Isv), who announced it to time.news Salute. “We have carried out what appears to be the first isolation of BA.2.86 in our country”, explains the specialist, full professor of Microbiology and Clinical Microbiology at the University of Brescia, director of the Microbiology Laboratory of the Asst Spedali Civili. Pirola’s isolation, Caruso specifies, occurred from the sample of “a fragile patient brought to our attention. Sequencing is underway”.
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“Pirola could supplant current variants”
The Pirola variant “has entered Italy and has all it takes to be able to gain a foothold and replace the circulating variants”. In terms of “capacity for diffusion and immune evasion”, it seems to have “the characteristics to be a successful variant that could also replace EG.5” or Eris, “currently dominant at 40-50%”, explains Caruso to time.news Health.
“There is absolutely no evidence that it is a more pathogenic or more aggressive variant than the previous ones”, the specialist is keen to point out. However, “once the complete sequencing of the isolated virus, currently underway – he underlines – has been completed, it will certainly be necessary to evaluate whether in this particular strain there are mutations that may suggest resistance to vaccination. This is why we are proceeding with the viral sequencing, to assess the possibility that BA.2.86 may cause some concern in this sense”.
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