Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya on Tuesday confirmed that two people died in Kerala after contracting the Nipah virus. The two men died in a private hospital of Kozhikode district. Four relatives of one of the deceased men are also under treatment.
Kerala’s health minister, Veena George also confirmed that after the two deaths, at least two more people have tested positive for the Nipah virus including a nine-year-old boy. Both of them are under treatment in the Kozhikode district. In total, seven people are currently under treatment and one of them is critical.
The state health department had already issued a high alert in Kozhikode district earlier this week after they suspected that the two deaths were caused by the Nipah virus. Now an alert has also been sounded in Kannur, Wayanad and Malappuram districts as well.
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Both of the deceased men, who had contracted Nipah virus, had been in contact with over a hundred people. One had been in contact with 168 people while the other had been in contact with 158. Out of them, 127 are health workers confirmed Kerala minister George. All the contacts have been placed under surveillance.
The Union Health Ministry has deployed three teams of experts from the National Centre of Disease Control to assist the state government. The teams are expected to reach the state on Wednesday. Apart from that, the National Institute of Virology (NIV) of Pune is also going to set up a mobile laboratory to speed up the testing process.
Nipah is a zoonotic virus which can spread from animals to humans and then among humans. It is named after the Malaysian village where it was first discovered in.
Major hosts of this virus are fruit bats, commonly known as flying foxes. Fruit bats transmit the virus to other animals like pigs, dogs, cats, horses, goats and sheep.
Humans get infected due to direct contact with animals infected by Nipah virus or by consuming any food that has been contaminated by the saliva or urine of an infected animal. The virus also transmits from human to human in case of direct contact with an infected person.
The common symptoms of Nipah virus include fever, headache, difficulty in breathing, cough, vomiting, diarrhoea, muscle pain and encephalitis (swelling in brain). Symptoms in some of the critical cases are disorientation and seizures.
As of today, there is no vaccine or cure available for the treatment of the Nipah virus. But the researchers are working on a monoclonal antibodies treatment.
India has seen four outbreaks of Nipah virus since the first case was detected in the country in 2001. The first outbreak happened in West Bengal’s Siliguri 2001 while the second happened in 2007 in Nadia district of West Bengal. The third outbreak happened in Kerala in 2018 followed by another one in Kerala in 2021.
Though the Nipah virus does not have a high transmission rate like SARS-CoV-2, it is more fatal in comparison. According to WHO, Nipah has a fatality rate of 40 to 75 percent. In the 2001 outbreak, 66 people tested positive for the virus in Siliguri, out of which 45 died. Similarly in 2007, all five infected people died. Recently, in 2018 out of 18 infected people, 17 succumbed to the virus.