health

 CDC tracking new highly-mutated COVID virus found in Israel 

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The WHO said that, so far, only a few sequences of the variant named BA.2.86 have been reported from a handful of countries.

By REUTERS AUGUST 18, 2023 06:09 Updated: AUGUST 18, 2023 13:41

Some 200 Israelis have contracted the JN.1 coronavirus variant, a highly

contagious sub-variant starting to dominate the latest wave of COVID-19 infections, Maariv reported on Monday.

The Health Ministry confirmed the report, adding that Israel has seen a small rise in morbidity rates...around 200 cases of the sub-variant were recorded in Israel."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a warning last

month that the rapid spread of the sub-variant could force US hospitals to start preparing for large numbers of hospitalizations.

Can the COVID-19 vaccine handle the new JN.1 strain?

However, early data suggests that these vaccines were less effective at neutralizing the strain. The CDC anticipates that JN.1 will continue to increase.

At this time, the CDC does not know to what extent JN.1 may contribute to these increases or possible increases during the rest of December

A group of experts assembled by the World Health Organization concluded this

month that the changes in JN.1 are not significant enough to require a new revision of the current vaccines

The lineage is named BA.2.86, and has been detected in the United States,

Denmark and Israel, the CDC said in a post on messaging platform X. Since the CDC's statement, an additional case of the variant was detected in the UK, according to Luke Blagdon Snell, a clinical research fellow at King's College London. The sample collected in the UK was most similar to samples collected in Denmark, according to Snell.