What is the rare Monkey B virus that killed vet in China?

A man has died after contracting a rare infectious disease known as the Monkey B virus that is carried by primates, Chinese officials have revealed.

The victim, a 53-year-old veterinarian, is the first reported human case of the virus in China and worked at a Beijing research institute specialising in primate breeding, according to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC). Two of his close contacts, a male doctor and a female nurse, were isolated following his death but tested negative for the virus.

What is Monkey B virus?

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The virus “is prevalent among macaque monkeys, but extremely rare - and often deadly - when it spreads to humans”, The Washington Post reports. Also known as “herpes B virus”, it “tends to attack the central nervous system and cause inflammation to the brain, leading to a loss of consciousness”, the paper adds, and has around an “​​80% fatality rate” if untreated.

India Today reports that the virus is “found in saliva, faeces, urine, brain or spinal cord tissue of macaques”, and can “survive for hours on surfaces, particularly when moist”.

“While the risk of common people getting infected by the virus is low, it is high among laboratory workers, veterinarians, and others who may be exposed to monkeys or their specimens,” according to the news site.

Despite that risk, however, the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) says that Monkey B infections in humans have been “rare” since the virus was first identified, in 1932. Only 50 cases have been recorded in humans, of whom 21 died.

Most of the infected people were diagnosed with the virus after being “bitten or scratched by a monkey, or when tissue or fluids from a monkey got on their broken skin, such as by needle stick or cut”, says the public health agency. In one case, in 1997, “a researcher died from B virus infection after bodily fluid from an infected monkey splashed into her eye”.

The vet who died in China is believed to have been infected while dissecting two dead monkeys.

The symptoms

The CDC lists the earliest symptoms of the Monkey B virus as:

• fever and chills
• muscle ache
• fatigue
• headache

Patients may later develop other symptoms including:

• Shortness of breath
• Nausea and vomiting
• Abdominal pain
• Hiccups

The agency say that as the disease progresses, it can cause pain, numbness, itching near the wound site; problems with muscle coordination; brain damage and severe damage to the nervous system; and in the most serious cases, death.

Chinese case

The unnamed vet “experienced nausea and vomiting followed by fever with neurological symptoms” a month after dissecting the monkeys in March, the CCDC reports.

Following his death, on 27 May, his blood and saliva samples were sent to the Beijing-based health centre, “where researchers found evidence” of the virus, says The Washington Post.

Like coronavirus, the Monkey B virus is “the consequence of species jumps”, Nikolaus Osterrieder, dean of the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences in Hong Kong, told the paper.

“But the important difference is that in the case from herpes B, it’s a dead end. It’s not jumping from one human to another human,” he continued. “SARS-CoV-2, on the other hand, acquired the ability to spread to a new host.”

The CCDC reports that the Chinese vet sought treatment “in several hospitals” prior to his death from the virus. But the state-owned Global Times says that his “close contacts are safe from it for now”.