A Nipah virus outbreak in India has brought back Covid-era surveillance

There have been two confirmed cases of Nipah virus in a hospital in West Bengal, India. Close to 200 people were also exposed to the infection. This has sparked concern across Asia, as the virus is extremely contagious. Several Asian countries have now instituted Covid-era airport screenings to monitor the spread of infection for which there’s currently no vaccine or cure.

From bat to human

This zoonotic infection originates from direct contact with infected animals — mainly flying fox bats and pigs — or their contaminated tissues and secretions. The disease can spread easily from person to person through contact with bodily fluids and cause minor to severe infections with a fatality rate of between 40% and 70%.

Those infected are “typically sick for 3 to 14 days with fever, headache, cough, sore throat and difficulty breathing,” said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In more severe cases, people may experience “brain swelling (or encephalitis), where severe symptoms can include confusion, drowsiness and seizures,” which can lead to coma in 24 to 48 hours. Symptoms may appear anywhere from four to 14 days after infection.

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While this virus is making headlines now, Nipah was first discovered in Malaysia in 1999. Since then, outbreaks have “occurred almost annually in Asia, particularly in Bangladesh and India,” between December and April, said The Washington Post.

But the current outbreak is West Bengal’s first since 2007. This represents a “return of Nipah to this area after a long gap, which is concerning from a surveillance standpoint,” Lauren Sauer, the director of the Special Pathogen Research Network at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, said to the Post. A total of 196 contacts of the infected were quarantined and tested negative for the virus.

The blueprint

While no official cases have been identified outside of India, Asian countries, including China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal and Thailand, have taken preventative measures. Officials have “increased cleaning and disease-control preparedness at Phuket International Airport,” said The Independent. Other airports are also performing “health declarations, temperature checks and visual monitoring for arriving passengers,” said The Associated Press.

Many of these measures were established during the Covid-19 pandemic. When scientists were “racing to find the origins of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the first Nipah outbreak was viewed as a case study in zoonotic disease spillover from animals to humans,” said the Post.

India has also “ensured timely containment of the cases” through “enhanced surveillance, laboratory testing and field investigations,” said the Indian Ministry of Health in a statement. Since there’s no preventive or curative medicine, avoiding infection is the best course of action.

If you have traveled or live in an area with an outbreak, wash your hands regularly with soap and water and avoid contact with anything that could be contaminated by flying fox bats or pigs. Also avoid the bodily fluids of anyone who has come in contact with the virus.

“Work is ongoing to establish a global platform for countries to report genome sequencing of detected cases,” Singapore’s Communicable Diseases Agency said in a statement. Most of the more recent Nipah outbreaks were found in Kerala, India. In 2018, at least 17 people were killed by the virus.