By Brooke Mallory, OAN Staff
Friday, September 6, 2024 12:06 PM
The same Chinese facility that allegedly leaked the new coronavirus to the world may also have leaked a “highly evolved” strain of polio, according to a new report obtained by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Daily Mail.
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A recent study has found that the strain of the virus that infected a four-year-old boy in Anhui province, China, is “99%” identical to a strain stored at the Wuhan Institute of Virology 200 miles away. The boy was infected during a major outbreak in that province.
“The findings highlight the shockingly perilous state of virology research around the world,” said Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist who was not involved in the study.
“Dr. Richard H. Ebright is Board Chair Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Laboratory Director of the Waksman Laboratory of Microbiology at Rutgers University. He directs a laboratory of approximately 10 postdocs, graduate students, and technicians and serves as project leader on three National Institutes of Health research grants.” Source.
But the origins of the strain, known as WIV14, still need to be investigated as other researchers are not convinced it definitely originated in the Wuhan facility.
Meanwhile, researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, speculate that the virus likely originated from a 1950s strain that was primarily used in laboratories to develop vaccines.
But there are still reasons to be suspicious, including the lab's reputation for poor safety measures and Anhui's relative proximity to Wuhan.
If the polio strain is linked to the Chinese state-run facility, it would be the latest in a series of safety violations, and an earlier congressional investigation led the Biden administration to cut funding to the facility just last year.
In 2022, after a 4-year-old boy in Anhui Province, China, was found to be infected with polio, tests in New York found “more than 70” traces of the virus in sewage, marking the first resurgence of polio in the United States in 10 years.
Researchers at the Institut Pasteur compared the complete genomic DNA of the WIV14 polio strain with that of the “Soaket A” strain, which is used in the development of most polio vaccines.
The genomes of the two strains, consisting of more than 7,000 basic DNA components, were found to differ by only 70 nucleotides (nt).
“Most people infected with the polio virus have no visible symptoms.
About 1 in 4 Poliovirus infection causes flu-like symptoms, including:
- sore throat
- heat
- Fatigue
- nausea
- headache
- Stomach pain
According to the CDC, “These symptoms usually last 2 to 5 days and then resolve on their own.”
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