First identified in Botswana and South Africa, this new iteration of the coronavirus has prompted concern among scientists and public health officials because of an unusually high number of mutations that have the potential to make the virus more transmissible and less susceptible to existing vaccines.
The World Health Organization has called omicron a “variant of concern” and Monday warned that the global risks posed by it were “very high,” despite what officials described as a multitude of uncertainties. Cases have been identified in 20 countries so far, including Britain, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands. Although omicron has not yet been detected in the United States, experts say it is only a matter of time before the variant shows up.
Should we be worried? Omicron’s discovery has prompted considerable panic, with a number of countries banning flights from southern Africa, or — like Israel, Japan and Morocco — barring entry of foreign travelers altogether.
But public health experts have urged caution, noting that there is as yet no firm evidence that omicron is more dangerous than previous variants like delta, which quickly overtook its predecessors in the United States and other countries.
Although delta turned out to be much more transmissible than prior variants — and there is some data suggesting it can cause more severe illness in the unvaccinated — there is little evidence it is more lethal or capable of outsmarting vaccines.
Much remains unknown about omicron, including whether it is more transmissible and capable of causing more serious illness. There is some evidence the variant can reinfect people more readily.
There are early signs that omicron may cause only mild illness. But that observation was based mainly on South Africa’s cases among young people, who are less likely overall to become severely ill from COVID.
Dr. Angelique Coetzee, who chairs the South African Medical Association, said that the nation’s hospitals were not overwhelmed by patients infected with the new variant, and most of those hospitalized were not fully immunized. Moreover, most patients she had seen did not lose their sense of taste and smell, and had only a slight cough.
On Tuesday, Regeneron said its COVID antibody treatment might be less effective against omicron, an indication that the popular and widely beneficial monoclonal antibody drugs may need to be updated if the new variant spreads aggressively.
That said, omicron’s emergence is so recent that it may be a while before experts know whether it is more pathogenic. COVID hospitalizations lag new infections by two weeks or more.
Scientists expect to learn much more in the coming weeks. At the moment, they say there is no reason to believe omicron is impervious to existing vaccines, although they may turn out to be less protective to some unknown degree.
There’s another reason to remain calm: Vaccine makers have expressed confidence they can tweak existing formulations to make the shots more effective against new variants.
Also reassuring: Omicron’s distinctive mutations make it easy to quickly identify with a nasal swab and lab test.
Why are scientists so concerned about omicron? As the coronavirus replicates inside people, new mutations constantly arise. Most provide the virus with no new advantage, but sometimes mutations can give the pathogen a leg up by allowing it spread more readily among its human hosts or dodge the body’s immune response.
Researchers in South Africa sounded the alarm because they found more than 30 mutations in the spike protein, a component on the surface of the variant that allows it to bind to human cells and gain entry to the body. Some of the samples from Botswana shared about 50 mutations throughout the virus not previously found in combination.
The spike protein is the chief target of antibodies that the immune system produces to fight a COVID-19 infection. Having so many mutations raises concerns that omicron’s spike might be able to somewhat evade antibodies produced by either previous infection or vaccination.
Those mutations also raise the prospect that the variant will reduce the efficacy of monoclonal antibody treatments — a fear partly confirmed Tuesday with Regeneron’s announcement.
Still, it is worth remembering the fate of earlier variants that stirred concern: Beta and mu, for example, evolved the ability to partially evade the body’s immune defenses, but they never became a serious threat to the world because they proved to be poor at transmitting.
What about vaccines? Vaccines are expected to provide some protection against omicron because they stimulate not only antibodies but also other immune cells that attack virus-infected cells. Mutations to the spike protein do not blunt that response, which most experts believe is instrumental in preventing serious illness and death.
Citing the potential for waning immunity six months or more after vaccination, some health experts are promoting booster shots to increase antibody levels.
The nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has urged people to get a booster shot, which he said would most likely provide additional protection against severe disease. “We’ve said it over and over again and it deserves repeating. If you’re not vaccinated, get vaccinated, get boosted if you are vaccinated, continue to use the mitigation methods, namely masks, avoiding crowds and poorly ventilated spaces,” he said Tuesday.
Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson, makers of vaccines approved for use in the United States, and AstraZeneca, which is widely used in Europe, have all said they were studying omicron and expressed confidence in their ability to tailor their formulations to target the variant.
Why is it called omicron? When the WHO began to name emerging variants of the coronavirus, they turned to the Greek alphabet — alpha, beta, gamma, delta and so on — to make them easier to describe. The first “variant of concern,” alpha, was identified in Britain in late 2020, soon followed by beta in South Africa.
But veterans of American sorority and fraternity life might have noticed the system has skipped the next two letters in the alphabetical order: nu and xi.
Officials thought nu would be too easily confused with “new,” but the next letter, xi, is a bit more complicated. WHO officials said it was a common last name, and therefore potentially confusing. Some noted that it is also the name of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping.
A spokesman for the WHO said organization’s policy was designed to avoid “causing offense to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional, or ethnic groups.”
Next in line? Omicron.
I’m fully vaccinated — I’ve even had my booster. So why should I care about omicron? Like delta, which was first identified in India, the rise of yet another worrisome variant in the developing world points to a more fundamental problem facing the global community more than a year and a half into the pandemic.
The hoarding of vaccines by wealthy countries while poorer nations struggle to obtain them provides more opportunities for SARS CoV-2 to replicate and mutate among the unvaccinated. More mutations mean there are more chances for the virus to become more infectious, immune-resistant or lethal.
And as the rapid spread of delta showed, a dangerous new variant is unlikely to remain in one place for very long.
The risks extend beyond public health. The resulting economic devastation from a new variant can hit affluent countries nearly as hard as those in the developing world. One academic study estimated trillions of dollars in economic loss to wealthy countries when residents of poorer countries remain largely unvaccinated.
MILWAUKEE (AP) — Whooping cough is at its highest level in a decade for this time of year, U.S. health officials reported Thursday.
There have been 18,506 cases of whooping cough reported so far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. That’s the most at this point in the year since 2014, when cases topped 21,800.
The increase is not unexpected — whooping cough peaks every three to five years, health experts said. And the numbers indicate a return to levels before the coronavirus pandemic, when whooping cough and other contagious illnesses plummeted.
Still, the tally has some state health officials concerned, including those in Wisconsin, where there have been about 1,000 cases so far this year, compared to a total of 51 last year.
Nationwide, CDC has reported that kindergarten vaccination rates dipped last year and vaccine exemptions are at an all-time high. Thursday, it released state figures, showing that about 86% of kindergartners in Wisconsin got the whooping cough vaccine, compared to more than 92% nationally.
Whooping cough, also called pertussis, usually starts out like a cold, with a runny nose and other common symptoms, before turning into a prolonged cough. It is treated with antibiotics. Whooping cough used to be very common until a vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, which is now part of routine childhood vaccinations. It is in a shot along with tetanus and diphtheria vaccines. The combo shot is recommended for adults every 10 years.
“They used to call it the 100-day cough because it literally lasts for 100 days,” said Joyce Knestrick, a family nurse practitioner in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Whooping cough is usually seen mostly in infants and young children, who can develop serious complications. That’s why the vaccine is recommended during pregnancy, to pass along protection to the newborn, and for those who spend a lot of time with infants.
But public health workers say outbreaks this year are hitting older kids and teens. In Pennsylvania, most outbreaks have been in middle school, high school and college settings, an official said. Nearly all the cases in Douglas County, Nebraska, are schoolkids and teens, said Justin Frederick, deputy director of the health department.
That includes his own teenage daughter.
“It’s a horrible disease. She still wakes up — after being treated with her antibiotics — in a panic because she’s coughing so much she can’t breathe,” he said.
It’s important to get tested and treated with antibiotics early, said Dr. Kris Bryant, who specializes in pediatric infectious diseases at Norton Children’s in Louisville, Kentucky. People exposed to the bacteria can also take antibiotics to stop the spread.
“Pertussis is worth preventing,” Bryant said. “The good news is that we have safe and effective vaccines.”
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AP data journalist Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
How a sperm and egg fuse together has long been a mystery.
New research by scientists in Austria provides tantalizing clues, showing fertilization works like a lock and key across the animal kingdom, from fish to people.
“We discovered this mechanism that’s really fundamental across all vertebrates as far as we can tell,” said co-author Andrea Pauli at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna.
The team found that three proteins on the sperm join to form a sort of key that unlocks the egg, allowing the sperm to attach. Their findings, drawn from studies in zebrafish, mice, and human cells, show how this process has persisted over millions of years of evolution. Results were published Thursday in the journal Cell.
Scientists had previously known about two proteins, one on the surface of the sperm and another on the egg’s membrane. Working with international collaborators, Pauli’s lab used Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence tool AlphaFold — whose developers were awarded a Nobel Prize earlier this month — to help them identify a new protein that allows the first molecular connection between sperm and egg. They also demonstrated how it functions in living things.
It wasn’t previously known how the proteins “worked together as a team in order to allow sperm and egg to recognize each other,” Pauli said.
Scientists still don’t know how the sperm actually gets inside the egg after it attaches and hope to delve into that next.
Eventually, Pauli said, such work could help other scientists understand infertility better or develop new birth control methods.
The work provides targets for the development of male contraceptives in particular, said David Greenstein, a genetics and cell biology expert at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study.
The latest study “also underscores the importance of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry,” he said in an email.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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