SYDNEY, January 29. /TASS/. Scientists from the Peter Doherty Institute in Australia's Melbourne have successfully grown a Wuhan coronavirus from a patient sample for the first time, the Institute's statement said.
"Scientists frome the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute) in Melbourne have successfully grown the Wuhan coronavirus from a patient sample, which will provide expert international laboratories with crucial information to help combat the virus," the statement said.
"Having the real virus means we now have the ability to actually validate and verify all test methods, and compare their sensitivities and specificities," The Royal Melbourne Hospital's Dr Julian Druce was quoted as saying.
"The virus will be used as positive control material for the Australian network of public health laboratories, and also shipped to expert laboratories working closely with the World Health Organization (WHO) in Europe," he added.
On December 31, 2019, Chinese authorities informed the World Health Organization (WHO) about an outbreak of an unknown pneumonia in the city of Wuhan, a large trade and industrial center in central China populated by 11 million people. On January 7, 2020, Chinese experts identified the infecting agent as coronavirus 2019-nCoV.
The new strain of coronavirus has already been identified in almost all Chinese provinces including Beijing and Shanghai as well as in other countries such as Australia, Malaysia, Nepal, France, Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea, Singapore, the United States and Japan. The World Health Organization recognized the pneumonia outbreak in China as a national emergency but stopped short of declaring it an international one.