Code Blue: Beware The Langya And Nipah Viruses
The Health and Agriculture Ministries must provide updated public information about the NiV and LayV viruses in humans and animals. Public authorities hiding such info from us is not good.
Beware The Langya And Nipah Viruses
By Dr Milton Lum | 19 August 2022
Researchers from China, Singapore, and Australia reported in a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine on August 4, 2022, about the identification of the Langya henipavirus (LayV) in a throat swab sample from a 53-year-old woman in Langya, Shandong province, China.
The genome of the LayV was most closely related to the Mojiang henipavirus that was first isolated from rats in an abandoned mine in Yunnan in south China.
Henipaviruses belong to the Paramyxoviridae family of viruses, which includes measles, mumps and many respiratory viruses that infect humans. Several other henipaviruses have been discovered in bats, rats and shrews, from Australia to South Korea and China, but only Hendra, Nipah and now LayV are known to infect people.
Langya Virus
The researchers that identified LayV had been monitoring patients with fever at three hospitals in Shandong and Henan between April 2018 and August 2021. They identified 35 patients, mostly farmers, with acute LayV of whom 26 were infected with LayV only with no other pathogens present.
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