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Published in the Journal Hepatology, the discovery of the new strains could inform hepatitis C treatment and vaccine development worldwide, and assist the World Health Organisation's aim of eliminating hepatitis C globally.
[...] Dr George S. Mgomella, joint first author on the paper from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and University of Cambridge, said: "In the largest study of hepatitis C in the general population in sub-Saharan Africa to date, we found a diverse range of hepatitis C virus strains circulating, and also discovered new strains that had never been seen before. Further research is needed as some antiviral drugs are effective against specific strains of hepatitis C virus and may not work as well in these populations."
Dr Emma Thomson, a senior author on the paper from Glasgow University, said: "It is important that there is a concerted effort to characterise hepatitis C strains in sub-Saharan Africa at a population level in order to assist countries to select optimal treatments for national procurement. It will also be important to inform vaccine design which would catalyse the elimination of hepatitis C by 2030."
The researchers discovered that current screening methods using antibody detection were inaccurate in Uganda and that detection of the virus itself would likely be a superior method for diagnosing the infection in high-risk populations. The researchers found that many of the strains present carry mutations in genes known to be associated with resistance to some commonly used antiviral drugs, proving that careful approaches are needed to diagnose and treat HCV effectively in Africa.
Dr Manj Sandhu, a senior author on the paper from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and University of Cambridge, said: "Our study highlights the need for more investment on people in Africa and developing parts of the world. We show there are clear differences in HCV across the world, underlining the need for understanding HCV globally. Our work will help inform public health policy and reveals that further studies and clinical trials in sub-Saharan Africa are urgently needed if the WHO is to achieve its vision of eliminating hepatitis C by 2030."
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 20 2018, @06:03PM
Unfortunately, decades of putting your point to practice has revealed that the average IQ of a population cannot be raised that much beyond a certain threshold (neglecting the Flynn effect*), and that IQ does indeed appear to be controlled by particular genes.
This is well documented in the literature on intelligence, which is a well established field of inquiry, whose experts do not find it even slightly controversial. Here; peruse this journal:
https://www.journals.elsevier.com/intelligence/ [elsevier.com]
This is also why the Chinese government has been pouring resources into genetic analysis and the editing of human genomes.
Do you want to solve problems or not?
If you do, then you must stop assuming that everyone is a cousin-fucking white supremacist (though Muslims are cousin fuckers, which has been put forward as part of the explanation for their flagging IQs). Besides, South East Asians (Chinesey types) have the highest average IQ.
* A study published in the year 2009 found that British children's average scores rose by 14 IQ points from 1942 to 2008; similar gains have been observed in many other countries in which IQ testing has long been widely used, including other Western European countries, Japan, and South Korea. However, research suggests that there is an ongoing reversed Flynn effect, i.e. a decline in IQ scores, in Norway, Denmark, Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, France and German-speaking countries, a development which appears to have started in the 1990s. (See Wikipedia for references)
I wonder what started in the 1990s...