New virus detected in China; here’s everything you need to know about it – WCCO

Although a new virus recently detected in China may not pose an immediate threat of outbreak, experts stress that its appearance is an example of the need for improved global disease surveillance.

Heres what you need to know about the virus

Langya henipavirus (LayV) was identified in 35 patients in China from April 2018 through August 2021. Research about the pathogen was published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In this report, investigators in China identified a new henipavirus associated with a febrile human illness, said the research. This virus was also found in shrews.

Symptoms of LayV include fever, cough and fatigue. It is related to other henipaviruses including the Hendra virus and the Nipah virus, which cause respiratory infections and can be fatal. These viruses belong to the Paramyxoviridae family of viruses that causes measles and mumps, according to the Nature journal.

So far, there have been no fatalities reported in connection to LayV.

Patients in China were recruited into the study of LayV if they had a fever. A 53-year-old woman from the town of Langya in Shandong Province was the first to be diagnosed with the virus.

During the study period, most patients with LayV were farmers and had symptoms ranging from severe pneumonia to a cough. Most also said in a questionnaire that they had been exposed to an animal within a month of their symptoms beginning.

Researchers have not observed any human-to-human transmission of the virus and none of the 35 cases appear to be linked, according to an article in the Nature journal. It said that researchers found LayV antibodies in a handful of goats and dogs, living in the villages of infected patients and identified LayV viral RNA in 27% of 262 sampled shrews, indicating that the animal is a reservoir for the virus.

This means that shrews pass the virus between themselves and are somehow infecting people here and there by chance, according to Emily Gurley, an infectious-diseases epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md.

It is not clear if patients with LayV were infected by shrews directly or an intermediate animal. Linfa Wang, a virologist at DukeNational University of Singapore Medical School in Singapore said there was limited contact tracing involved in the study and Gurley said more research is needed regarding how the virus spreads.

Why is this virus important?

Researchers believe that humans were infected with LayV by animals, which is referred to as zoonotic spillover.

These sorts of zoonotic spillover events happen all the time, said Edward Holmes, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia, according to the Nature journal. The world needs to wake up.

According to a 2021 study published in the Genetics and Molecular Biology Journal most human infectious diseases (60-75%) are derived from pathogens that originally circulated in non-human animal species, which demonstrates that spillover has a fundamental role in the emergence of new human infectious diseases.

A white paper released in June by the World Health Organization said shortening the time between a spillover event and disease detection is a major focus of global disease prevention improvement and Health Emergency Preparedness, Response, and Resilience (HEPR) efforts.

Two current outbreaks the COVID-19 pandemic and the monkeypox outbreak have been traced to potential zoonotic spillover events.

The virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, is a zoonotic virus, which means it can spread between people and animals, said a November statement from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Per the CDC, the virus likely originated in bats and monkeypox was first observed in colonies of monkeys kept for research.

Research into the LayV genome shows it is most closely related to Mojiang henipavirus first isolated in rats in an abandoned mine in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan a decade ago.

There is no particular need to worry about this, but ongoing surveillance is critical, said Holmes of the recent LayV cases. Gurely also said that outbreaks typically occur after false starts.

If we are actively looking for those sparks, then we are in a much better position to stop or to find something early, she said.

Going forward, Taiwans Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said it plans to establish a nucleic acid testing method to identify cases of LayV, according to the Taipei Times.

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New virus detected in China; here's everything you need to know about it - WCCO