U.S. rushes to catch up in the race to detect constantly mutating viruses
Scientists blame absence of national leadership and co-ordination
NEW YORK — Despite its worldclass medical system and its vaunted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. fell behind in the race to detect dangerous coronavirus mutations. And it’s only now beginning to catch up.
The problem has not been a shortage of technology or expertise. Rather, scientists say, it’s an absence of national leadership and co-ordination, plus a lack of funding and supplies for overburdened laboratories trying to juggle diagnostic testing with the hunt for genetic changes.
“We have the brains. We have the tools. We have the instruments,” said Ilhem Messaoudi, director of a virus research centre at University of California, Irvine. “It’s just a matter of supporting that effort.”
Viruses mutate constantly. To stay ahead of the threat, scientists analyze samples, watching closely for mutations that might make the coronavirus more infectious or more deadly. But such testing has been scattershot.
Less than one per cent of positive specimens in the U.S. are being sequenced to determine whether they have worrisome mutations. Other countries do better — Britain sequences about 10 per cent — meaning they can more quickly see threats coming at them. That gives them greater opportunity to slow or stop the problem.
CDC officials say variants have not driven recent surges in overall U.S. cases. But experts worry what’s happening with variants is not clear and say the nation should have been more aggressive about sequencing earlier in the epidemic that has now killed more than 450,000 Americans.
“If we had evidence it was changing,” said Ohio State molecular biologist Dan Jones, “maybe people would’ve acted differently.”
U.S. scientists have detected more than 500 cases of a variant first identified in Britain and expect it to become the cause of most of this country’s new infections in a matter of weeks. Another troubling variant tied to Brazil and a third discovered in South Africa were detected last week in the U.S. and also are expected to spread.
The British variant is more contagious and is believed to more deadly than the original, while the South Africa one may render the vaccines somewhat less effective. The ultimate fear is a variant resistant to existing vaccines and treatments could emerge. Potentially worrisome versions may form inside the U.S., too. “This virus is mutating, and it doesn’t care of it’s in Idaho or South Africa,” Messaoudi said.
But the true dimensions of the problem in the U.S. are not clear because of the relatively low level of sequencing.
“You only see what’s under the lamppost,” said Kenny Beckman, director of the University of Minnesota Genomics Center.
After the slow start, public health labs in at least 33 states are now doing genetic analysis to identify emerging variants. Other states have formed partnerships with university or private labs to do the work. North Dakota, which began sequencing last week, was the most recent to start that work, according to the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
The CDC believes a minimum of 5,000 to 10,000 samples should be analyzed weekly in the U.S. to adequately monitor variants, said Gregory Armstrong, who oversees the agency’s advanced molecular detection work. And it’s only now that the nation is hitting that level, he acknowledged.
Still, it is a jumble of approaches: Some public health labs sequence every positive virus specimen. Some focus on samples from certain outbreaks or certain patients. Others randomly select samples to analyze.
On top of that, labs continue to have trouble getting needed supplies used in both gene sequencing and diagnostic testing. U.S. President Joe Biden is proposing a $1.9-trillion (U.S.) package that calls for boosting federal spending on sequencing of the virus.