Health authorities in India say they have contained a potential outbreak of a bat-borne virus with no approved vaccine or cure. With a fatality rate between 40% to 75%, authorities in several Asian countries are stepping up screening measures, including temperature checks for airport passengers to prevent further spread.
The Nipah virus can be transmitted from animals to humans – especially from fruit bats and pigs – and between humans, according to the World Health Organization.
UVA Today checked in with infectious disease and international health expert Dr. William Petri, the University of Virginia’s Wade Hampton Frost Professor of Medicine and vice chair for research in the Department of Medicine, to learn more about the virus.
Dr. William Petri is the Wade Hampton Frost Professor of Medicine and vice chair for research in the UVA Department of Medicine. (University Communications photo)
Q. What is Nipah, and where does it come from?
A. Nipah killed the character Gwyneth Paltrow was playing in the movie “Contagion!” The Nipah virus is an RNA virus, like the COVID-19 virus, but it is similar to rabies and Ebola.
In Bangladesh, where I do maternal and child health research, the virus is endemic, transmitted by ingestion of raw date palm sap. Date palm sap is not dissimilar to maple syrup. It’s harvested not by tapping the trunk of the tree, but by cutting the fruit stalks of the tree.
Fruit bats are the reservoir of the virus, and the bats, by feeding on the date palm sap, contaminate it with the Nipah virus through their feces, saliva or urine.
About a week after ingestion of the contaminated date palm sap, infected people get fever and flu-like symptoms, followed by headache and confusion as the virus invades the brain. It causes an inflammation of the brain called encephalitis that, in more than half of infected people, leads to coma and death.
Q. Why is it so dangerous?
A. Part of the reason that it is so deadly is that it enters and replicates in many different cells, gaining entry through what are called ephrin receptors that … regulate cell movement. Cells in the body infected by Nipah include the epithelial cells lining the lung airways, the endothelial cells that line blood vessels, and neurons.
