Check If Mutant Virus Caused Surge In Cases Says Virologist

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A UM virologist says that vaccines may have to be tweaked if a new strain is causing the surge in Covid-19 cases. (AP pic)PETALING JAYA: A virologist has called for studies of the local strains of Covid-19 to determine if a newer mutant variant is behind the four-digit growth in cases in Malaysia over the past two weeks.
Universiti Malaya virologist Lam Sai Kit said genomic sequencing was key to detect the newer and more infectious strains, such as the UK, South Africa and Brazilian variants.
He said many positive cases caused by newer variants might have been missed because of the lack of sufficient testing. He suspects that newer strains could have led to the sharp growth in the number of cases over the past few weeks.
Lam said that to date, Malaysia has only contributed 300 genome sequences to the international database, compared to 4,000 provided by Thailand.
Lam Sai Kit, a virologist with Universiti Malaya.“In Malaysia, there must be more cases in the community accounting for such a large surge, since it is known that the variants found in the UK and other places have high transmissibility, up to 70% more than the normal strain,” he said.
Lam said Malaysia should be on high alert for these new variants of Covid-19. “It is important for Malaysia to monitor for virus variants and contribute our findings to the global genome sequence database.
“We should and can do more. If the health ministry is not able to undertake this because of workload, the academic and private laboratories can help out.”
Lam said that currently, the Institute for Medical Research and the health ministry are in charge of genomic sequencing.
He said the recent variants from the UK, South Africa and Brazil have sparked concerns that vaccines may be less effective against them.
“There is no strong evidence as yet that the present vaccines won’t work. However, scientists have raised the possibility that the Brazil variant can evade antibodies, which would impact the current vaccines’ effectiveness,” he said. - FMT

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