Risk of Nipah virus spreading beyond India is low: WHO
The country has the capacity to contain such outbreaks, it adds
[HYDERABAD] There is a low risk of the deadly Nipah virus spreading from India, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday (Jan 30), adding that it did not recommend travel or trade curbs after two infections were reported by the South Asian nation.
Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam are among the Asian locations that tightened airport screening checks this week to guard against such a spread, after India confirmed the infections.
“The WHO considers the risk of further spread of infection from these two cases to be low,” the agency told Reuters in an e-mail on Friday, adding that India had the capacity to contain such outbreaks.
“There is no evidence yet of increased human-to-human transmission,” it said, sharing that it has coordinated with Indian health authorities.
But it did not rule out further exposure to the virus, which circulates in the bat population in parts of India and neighbouring Bangladesh.
Carried by fruit bats and animals such as pigs, the virus can cause fever and brain inflammation. It has a fatality rate ranging from 40 to 75 per cent; there is no cure, though vaccines in development are still being tested.
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It spreads to humans from infected bats, or the fruit they contaminate. Person-to-person transmission is, however, not easy as it typically requires prolonged contact with those who have been infected.
Small outbreaks are not unusual, and virologists said the risk to the general population remains low.
The source of the infection has not yet been fully understood, said the WHO.
It classifies Nipah as a priority pathogen because of a lack of licensed vaccines or treatments, a high fatality rate, and a fear it could mutate into a more transmissible variant.
Nipah not new to India
The two health workers infected in India’s eastern state of West Bengal in late December are being treated in hospital, local authorities have said.
India regularly reports sporadic Nipah infections, particularly in its southern state of Kerala, regarded as one of the world’s highest-risk regions for the virus.
The state has been linked to dozens of deaths since it first emerged there in 2018.
The outbreak is the seventh documented in India and the third in West Bengal, where outbreaks in 2001 and 2007 were in districts bordering Bangladesh, which reports outbreaks almost annually, the WHO said. REUTERS
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