WASHINGTON (AP) – U.S. scientists will have significantly expanded capabilities to identify potentially deadly coronavirus mutations under congressional legislation. A House bill on the floor debate would yield $ 1.75 billion for genomic sequencing.
The US now only maps the genetic makeup of a minuscule fraction of positive virus samples, a situation that some experts fly as blind. This means that the true household spread of problematic mutations first identified in the UK and South Africa is a matter of guesswork.
Such ignorance can be costly. One concern is that more transmissible forms such as the British variant could move faster than the country’s ability to get the vaccine into Americans’ arms.
“You have a small number of laboratories for academic and public health care, which basically did the genomic monitoring,” said David O’Connor, an AIDS researcher at the University of Wisconsin. “But there is no national coherence in the strategy.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is trying to address these efforts, joining the government’s own advanced detection work, but COVID-19 legislation will take the hunt to another level.
In addition to money, the House Bill that the Committee on Energy and Trade has cleared asks the CDC to organize a national network to use the technology to detect the spread of mutations and target countermeasures on public health.
In the Senate, Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin introduced legislation that would provide $ 2 billion. Baldwin says that the US should use gene mapping technology to analyze at least 15% of the positive virus samples. This may not sound like much, but the current rate is probably 0.3% to 0.5%. By analyzing 15% of the positive samples, the surveillance will be extended at least 30 times.
“Variants represent a growing threat,” Baldwin said. “At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, expanding our testing capability was essential to our ability to detect and slow down the spread of the virus – the same goes for its detection and detection variants. ”
Genomic sequencing essentially involves mapping the DNA of an organism, the key to its unique properties. This is done by high-tech machines that can cost from one hundred thousand dollars to $ 1 million or more. Technicians trained to operate the machines and computer skills to support the entire process contribute to the cost.
In the case of the British variant first detected in England, the changes in the virus made it easier to spread and it also became presumably more deadly COVID-19 disease. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle reports that the transfer of the British variant has been confirmed in at least ten U.S. states. CDC Director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, told governors on Tuesday that it could become dominant by the end of March.
The sequence of 0.3% to 0.5% of virus samples, as the US does now, “just does not give us the ability to detect strains as they develop and become dominant,” said Dr Phil Febbo, chief medical officer officer of Illumina, a San Diego-based company that develops genomic sequencing technologies.
The Biden government must set a very clear goal, ‘he added. “What is the hill we are going to load?”
“We need that data. Otherwise we fly blind in some ways, ”says Esther Krofah, who runs the FasterCures initiative of the Milken Institute. “We do not understand the occurrence of mutations that we should be concerned about in the US”
Even more worrying than the British variant, is a strain that was first detected in South Africa, and which scientists suspect could reduce the protective effect of some of the vaccines against coronavirus. This variant has also been identified in a limited number of cases in the US.
White House coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients called the detection of virus mutations in the US “completely unacceptable” and said the country was 43rd in the world. But the Biden government has not set a target for what level of virus gene mapping the country should strive for.
At the University of Wisconsin, AIDS scientist O’Connor said he and his colleagues began sequencing coronavirus samples in the Madison area “because we live there.”
His colleague, virology expert Thomas Friedrich, said a national effort would require more than money to purchase new genomic sequencing machines. The CDC will have to set standards for public health officials and academic research institutions to fully share the information they obtain from the analysis of virus samples. Currently, there is a jumble of state regulations and practices, and some of them restrict access to important details.
“We should consider it a Manhattan project or an Apollo program,” Friedrich said, referring to the scientific efforts of the government that developed the atomic bomb and landed men on the moon.
The UK was able to identify its variant because the national health system has a coordinated gene mapping program aimed at sequencing about 10% of the samples, he added. Since that happened, there has been more urgency for genetic sequencing on this side of the Atlantic.
“The usefulness of doing this may not have been so obvious to so many people before these variants emerged,” Friedrich said.
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