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.
Sooo… We going for another round or…?
yea … JFC … I was kinda chill until I read “zoonotic … pigs and bats” … literally the vector(s) in contagion and obviously COVID.
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.
Thanks!
From the Wikipedia page it seems that there are small outbreaks every year in the region of origin (India/Malaysia). It seems like the government is quite good at tracking down infected and potentially infected - which is lucky since the mortality rate is above 50%! I wonder what happens if one of the infected jumped on a plane to a completely different place in the world that was not so good at managing it.
The higher the mortality rate the quicker people tend to get it under control. I guess that’s partially because a dead host is less likely to spread the infection, and partly because people take it more seriously than a bad cough.
Statistically it’s 1 per century
Good point, but I suppose we have planes and such now allowing for much faster cross-country transmission?
But we are encroaching on wild places like never before, which doesn’t help our chances at it staying at one per century.
Human to human infection has not happened. People need to stop drinking date palm juice covered in bat shit.
We just need to invent synthetic bat shit and problem solved.
Also don’t do large, dense farming
Most experts do not classify Nipah virus as airborne, though there is consensus that transmission can—and does—occur from short-range exposure to NiV-infected respiratory droplets in close contact settings.[10]
Indirect transmission of Nipah virus via contaminated fomites is likely responsible for many cases in which there was no known direct contact with a NiV-infected person or animal.[
