Health authorities in India’s Kerala state have issued an alert after a 14-year-old boy died of the Nipah virus.
According to the state’s health minister, an additional 60 people have been identified as being in the high-risk category of having the disease.
The Nipah virus infection is a “zoonotic illness” transmitted from animals like pigs and fruit bats to humans, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The WHO has described the virus as a priority pathogen because of its potential to trigger an epidemic.
Sooo… We going for another round or…?
From the Wikipedia page it seems that there are small outbreaks every year in the region of origin (India/Malaysia). It seems like the government is quite good at tracking down infected and potentially infected - which is lucky since the mortality rate is above 50%! I wonder what happens if one of the infected jumped on a plane to a completely different place in the world that was not so good at managing it.
The higher the mortality rate the quicker people tend to get it under control. I guess that’s partially because a dead host is less likely to spread the infection, and partly because people take it more seriously than a bad cough.
Human to human infection has not happened. People need to stop drinking date palm juice covered in bat shit.
We just need to invent synthetic bat shit and problem solved.
Also don’t do large, dense farming
Statistically it’s 1 per century
But we are encroaching on wild places like never before, which doesn’t help our chances at it staying at one per century.