Just as COVID-19 began its life as a mysterious virus that crossed over from an animal to humans, it is natural that the public might look at other emergent zoonotic viruses with similar wariness. This, perhaps, explains the recent attention paid to a new Langya virus outbreak in China that has already infected 35 people. Could this lead to another global pandemic?
Fortunately, that is very unlikely, experts say. Unfortunately, that does not mean that the virus is not a threat, as a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine revealed that there were 35 infections in a pair of eastern Chinese provinces in 2021.
Yet one reason not to be alarmed is, quite simply, that none of those patients died. Another lies in the nature of the Langya virus itself: It does not appear to have spread through human-to-human contact, and the infected patients all had close contact with animals like fruit bats and shrews, which were likely the original hosts.
RELATED: How 40 years without smallpox vaccinations could make the monkeypox outbreak worse
“There are clearly repeated transmission events from what looks to be a common reservoir in shrews,” Vaughn Cooper, an evolutionary biology professor at the University of Pittsburgh, told NBC News. “The team did a very nice job of evaluating alternatives and finding that as the most likely explanation.”
Yet while this virus does not seem to pose a global threat, it is part of a classification of viruses with a long and ugly history. They are known as henipaviruses.
Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.
Henipaviruses are negative-strand RNA viruses that are commonly found in mammals like shrews and fruit bats. Some henipaviruses are very dangerous; the Nipah virus, for instance, has a fatality rate between 40% and 75%. In addition to causing fevers, headaches, coughing and other flu-like symptoms, the Nipah virus can lead to serious side effects like brain swelling (encephalitis), seizures and even comas. Then there is the Hendra virus which has a fatality rate of 57% for the humans that it infects, bringing with it symptoms that can as with the Nipah virus also seem flu-like — and, likewise, can lead to brain swelling and death.
While the Langya virus does not appear to be a global threat, other henipaviruses do pose large problems on the regional level. A February article in the scientific journal PLOS: Neglected Tropical Diseases had this observation about the Nipah virus (NiV).
“Malaysia (43%), Bangladesh (42%), and India (15%) represent all incident cases of human NiV infections worldwide,” the authors explained. “Apart from the human catastrophe of high morbidity and mortality rates during documented epidemic outbreaks, the economic impact is tremendous. After the first NiV outbreak in 1999, Malaysian pig industry and related sectors suffered enormous damage, i.e., 1.1 million pigs were culled costing about US$66.8 million with a total decrease in the Malaysian economy of around 30% during that time.”
The authors also said that a global spread could arise from henipaviruses that can be spread through person-to-person transmission — such as NiV.
“The capacity for NiV to spread in hospital settings between staff and patients was shown in an outbreak 2001 in Siliguri, India, which affected 66 people,” the authors wrote. “The outbreak originated from an unidentified patient admitted to Siliguri District Hospital who infected 11 people. Thus, the ability of NiV to spread from patients to nursing staff has raised concern that the virus might adapt to more efficient human-to-human transmission.”
Read more
about this topic
A new Langya virus has infected 35 people in China. Here’s what you need to know & Latest News Update
A new Langya virus has infected 35 people in China. Here’s what you need to know & More Live News
All this news that I have made and shared for you people, you will like it very much and in it we keep bringing topics for you people like every time so that you keep getting news information like trending topics and you It is our goal to be able to get
all kinds of news without going through us so that we can reach you the latest and best news for free so that you can move ahead further by getting the information of that news together with you. Later on, we will continue
to give information about more today world news update types of latest news through posts on our website so that you always keep moving forward in that news and whatever kind of information will be there, it will definitely be conveyed to you people.
A new Langya virus has infected 35 people in China. Here’s what you need to know & More News Today
All this news that I have brought up to you or will be the most different and best news that you people are not going to get anywhere, along with the information Trending News, Breaking News, Health News, Science News, Sports News, Entertainment News, Technology News, Business News, World News of this made available to all of you so that you are always connected with the news, stay ahead in the matter and keep getting today news all types of news for free till today so that you can get the news by getting it. Always take two steps forward
Credit Goes To News Website – This Original Content Owner News Website . This Is Not My Content So If You Want To Read Original Content You Can Follow Below Links