Health authorities in India’s Kerala state have issued an alert after a 14-year-old boy died of the Nipah virus.
According to the state’s health minister, an additional 60 people have been identified as being in the high-risk category of having the disease.
The Nipah virus infection is a “zoonotic illness” transmitted from animals like pigs and fruit bats to humans, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The WHO has described the virus as a priority pathogen because of its potential to trigger an epidemic.
You should read the book Spillover if you want a fun background on zoonotic viruses. It was written pre-COVID and checks in on Adobe of the wet markets where SARS broke out and concludes that another virus is likely to break out from there. It also goes into other horrendously deadly viruses like ebola, nipah, hendra, etc and his they get spread.
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