Nipah virus infection Hi my dear readers, there came new virus called nipah virus is twice as dangerous as the Corona virus

 

Nipah virus infection 

Hi my dear readers, there came new virus called nipah virus is twice as dangerous as the Corona virus

Nipah virus infection is a zoonotic illness that is transmitted to people from animals, and can also be transmitted through contaminated food or directly from person-to-person. In infected people, it causes a range of illnesses from asymptomatic (subclinical) infection to acute respiratory illness and fatal encephalitis. The virus can also cause severe disease in animals such as pigs, resulting in significant economic losses for farmers.

Although Nipah virus has caused only a few known outbreaks in Asia, it infects a wide range of animals and causes severe disease and death in people.

wash your hands every time you have contact with animals

During the first recognized outbreak in Malaysia, which also affected Singapore, most human infections resulted from direct contact with sick pigs or their contaminated tissues. Transmission is thought to have occurred via unprotected exposure to secretions from the pigs, or unprotected contact with the tissue of a sick animal.

wash your hands every time you have contact with animals

In subsequent outbreaks in Bangladesh and India, consumption of fruits or fruit products (such as raw date palm juice) contaminated with urine or saliva from infected fruit bats was the most likely source of infection.

Human-to-human transmission of Nipah virus has also been reported among family and care givers of infected patients.

No drug or vaccine

targets Nipah virus

WHO has identified Nipah virus as a priority disease for the WHO Research and Development Blueprint.

Blueprint and Nipah Virus

Nipah virus is one of the pathogens in the WHO R&D Blueprint list of epidemic threats needing urgent R&D action. Nipah virus was first identified during an outbreak of disease that took place in Malaysia in 1998. Both animal-to-human and human-to-human transmission have been documented. From 1998 to 2015, more than 600 cases of Nipah virus human infections were reported. Subsequent outbreaks in India and Bangladesh have occurred with high case fatality.

news about nipah virus

Nipah: The Very Model of a Pandemic.

There are two pieces of good news when it comes to Nipah virus. The first is that it’s only ever been observed in humans in five countries. More on the second later.

Nipah virus is a nasty disease to say the least. It was first identified in 1998 in Malaysia, in the area for which it is named. It is a member of the henipavirus genus of paramyxoviruses which also includes Hendra virus (measles is a distant cousin). The first outbreak of Nipah resulted in 265 human cases with 105 dying, a 40 percent mortality rate. Subsequent outbreaks have recorded an average mortality rate of 75 percent.

The World Health Organization has just listed Nipah virus as one of the ten most important pathogens to monitor and prepare countermeasures to prevent a pandemic," EcoHealth Alliance Vice President for Science and Outreach Dr. Jon Epstein said. "Importantly, we’ve also been working internationally with local partners for more than 15 years to better understand where and how Nipah virus is likely to cause outbreaks, so we can prevent small outbreaks from spreading globally."

In humans, Nipah mostly presents with encephalitic symptoms, or, in layman’s terms, symptoms associated with brain swelling: headache, stiff neck, vomiting, dizziness and coma. It is probably most familiar as the inspiration for the 2011 Steven Soderbergh film Contagion. While Nipah has received relatively little media attention stateside, its transmission does demonstrate the importance of approaching pandemic preparedness from a One Health mindset.

Toward the end of the 20th century, Malaysia experienced rapid growth in both its economy and its population. The former was due, in part, to booming lumber and palm oil industries, both of which required significant clearing of natural rainforest in order to make space.

And as the nation became more prosperous, its agricultural practices shifted as well. Family farms slowly grew into commercial ones, as fewer and fewer people raised their own food. Land was cleared there too, in order to make room for the ramped up farming industry. Large-scale pig farms were increasingly common and on the edges of these piggeries, fruit orchards were planted, so as to generate additional income for the farm.

Loss of human life wasn't the only cost of the 1999 Nipah outbreak, farmers had to cull nearly 1,000,000 pigs to stop the disease's spread

Nipah virus is endemic to fruit bats which live in Southeast Asia. The virus does not affect them, but they carry it and can spread it through their bodily fluids, like saliva or urine. While wild fruit bats are used to searching the forest for wild figs or nectar, an entire orchard is a far easier food supply for them and fresh mangoes are, well, ripe for the picking. On the index farm, the orchards were planted so closely to the pig enclosures that bits of fruit nibbled by the bats fell into the pigs’ pens, a sweet-looking snack which created the perfect opportunity for a bat virus to pass on to pigs and, later, people.

Understanding pandemics–and preventing them–requires an understanding of each step in this chain of events. At EcoHealth Alliance, we are working on the policy level, to encourage smart and strategic land-use change which considers the potential public health implications of tearing down forest. We are also surveilling wildlife in nearly 30 countries to track which pathogens they carry to mitigate risk of spillover. And, of course, we are working on the ground with people, to educate and to encourage behaviors which lessen the odds of disease spillover.

Our hotspots map of global pandemic risk uses multiple risk factors to determine areas where emerging diseases are most likely to pop up

Nipah provides an extraordinary model for studying and preventing pandemics because its spillover resembles the typical emerging disease in that it is of animal origin, endemic to highly populated and highly diverse regions, and its spread is driven mostly by human behavior.

In the case of the 1999 Nipah outbreak, it wasn’t bats who passed Nipah to humans, but the pigs. And that leads to the second piece of good news about Nipah virus: while person-to-person transmission has been observed, it is relatively rare. Nipah has not yet developed the ability to be spread easily like respiratory viruses such as the flu and SARS. It is very difficult, for now, for Nipah to spread very far from the initial point of spillover. But viruses, like all living things, evolve and, for viruses, evolutionary success is being able to spread far and wide.

Our objective is to study and to learn as much as possible about Nipah virus in animals and people, and the types of human activities like agricultural expansion, that can allow it to jump from bats to people, before it becomes a global pandemic. It is our research that stands between you and the next pandemic.

https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/2018/03/nipah

From the Nipah Virus International Conference in Singapore, Vincent speaks with meeting participants about the history of the first Nipah virus outbreak, lessons learned from Hendra virus, surveillance of bats for viruses, and the development of a vaccine.