By: Emmanuel Abi Couson
Virologists and other experts are worried that the Nipah virus could cause the next deadly global virus outbreak
A teenage boy in India has died from the disease described as an incurable brain virus that could spark the next pandemic.
The 14-year-old school-child was diagnosed with Nipah virus in the country’s southern state of Kerala, and died after suffering from a cardiac arrest.
Officials are now monitoring 214 people, 60 of whom are thought to be at high risk of an infection with the virus.
Nipah virus is part of the paramyxovirus family — which also includes measles and mumps. Experts fear it could be ‘simmering in the background’ before triggering the next global outbreak.
Three in four people who catch the virus die from it, data shows — far higher than Covid’s current fatality rate of less than one percent. There is also no vaccine or treatment for the disease. It comes after another outbreak in the state in September, last year which was the largest known globally to date — with 30 people infected.
One of the viruses, the Nipah virus, can infect cells with receptors that regulate what gets in or out of cells that line the central nervous system and vital organs. This variant has a fatality rate of up to 75 percent compared to Covid’s, which is well under one percent.
One of the viruses, the Nipah virus, can infect cells with receptors that regulate what gets in or out of cells that line the central nervous system and vital organs. This variant has a fatality rate of up to 75 percent compared to Covid’s, which is well under one percent
Doctors have sought to play down concerns in Kerala, saying there is a ‘minimum chance’ of an outbreak at this stage.
Close contacts will be monitored for the next three to seven days, the average time taken for an infection to occur.
Patients catch the virus via contact with feces, blood or saliva from an infected person. It can also be spread via respiratory droplets from patients.
Confirming the death, the state health minister Veena George told TV reporters: ‘The infected boy died on Sunday after a cardiac arrest.’
It was not clear at this stage how the boy became infected, or how long it took for him to die from the virus.
But people normally contract it from touching the excrement of pigs, with the animals becoming infected after consuming food or water contaminated with the droppings of fruit bats. People can also catch the disease from contaminated fruit.
Patients suffer from a fever, cough, sore throat and difficulty breathing in the infection as the virus infects the airways.
Scientists note that unlike the flu and Covid-19 are ‘speedy shape-shifters,’ paramyxoviruses appear not to mutate as they spread, but they have become ‘very good at transmission among humans
It can then spread to the blood and travel to the brain, where an infection causes encephalitis, or brain swelling, that leads to death.
It can also spread to the lungs and trigger severe pneumonia, which can also prove fatal.
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Warning over the disease’s pandemic potential, it was added to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ list of pandemic pathogens to watch in October.
It also inspired the 2011 film Contagion, which tracks the emergence of a new pandemic virus.
Starring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Winslet, a woman returns home from a business trip in Hong Kong and brings back a lethal microbe that triggered a global pandemic – the disease was the Nipah virus.
‘Just imagine if a paramyxovirus emerged that was as contagious as measles and as deadly as Nipah,’ Michael Norris, Ph.D., assistant professor at the University of Toronto, said in a statement.
‘Influenza has been sequenced to death,’ Benhur Lee, a virologist at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, told The Atlantic.
Lee continued to explain that this is not the case for paramyxoviruses because most people infected with one of the more than 75 viruses do not survive, making it nearly impossible to develop treatments and vaccines.
