A teenage boy in India has died from an incurable brain virus that experts fear could trigger the next pandemic.
The 14-year-old schoolboy was diagnosed with the Nipah virus in the southern state of Kerala and died of cardiac arrest.
Officials are currently monitoring 214 people, 60 of whom are at high risk of infection with the virus.
Nipah virus is part of the paramyxovirus family, which also includes measles and mumps. Experts fear it could simmer ‘in the background’ before causing the next global outbreak.
Three in four people who contract the virus die from it, data shows — far higher than the current Covid death rate of less than one percent. There is also no vaccine or treatment for the disease. It comes after another outbreak in the state in September that was the largest known globally — with 30 people infected.
One of the viruses, Nipah virus, can infect cells with receptors that regulate what comes in or out of cells lining the central nervous system and vital organs. This strain has a mortality rate as high as 75 percent compared to Covid, which is well under one percent
Doctors are trying to downplay concerns in Kerala, saying there is a “minimal chance” of an outbreak at this stage.
Close contacts will be monitored for the next three to seven days, the average time it takes to develop an infection.
Patients get the virus through contact with feces, blood or saliva from an infected person. It can also be spread through respiratory droplets from patients.
Health Minister Veena George confirmed the death, telling TV reporters: “The infected boy died of cardiac arrest on Sunday.”
At that time it was not yet clear how the boy had become infected and how long it took for him to die from the virus.
But humans usually get it from touching pig feces, with the animals getting infected after consuming food or water contaminated with bat feces. People can also get the disease from contaminated fruit.
Patients experience fever, cough, sore throat and difficulty breathing as a result of the infection, as the virus infects the respiratory tract.
Scientists note that unlike the flu and Covid-19, paramyxoviruses are “rapidly shape-shifting” and do not appear to mutate as they spread, but have “become very good at transmitting between people”
The disease can then spread to the blood and brain, where infection causes encephalitis (swelling of the brain), leading to death.
It can also spread to the lungs and cause severe pneumonia, which can also be fatal.
Because the disease has the potential to become a pandemic, it was added in October to the list of pandemic pathogens that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases must monitor.
It also inspired the 2011 film Contagion, which chronicles the emergence of a new pandemic virus.
Starring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Winslet, the film follows a woman who returns from a business trip to Hong Kong to bring back a deadly microbe that has caused a global pandemic: the Nipah virus.
“Imagine if a paramyxovirus emerged that was as contagious as measles and as deadly as Nipah,” Michael Norris, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, said in a statement.
“Influenza has been sequenced to death,” Benhur Lee, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told The Atlantic.
Lee went on to explain that this is not the case for paramyxoviruses, as most people who contract one of the more than 75 viruses do not survive the disease, making it nearly impossible to develop treatments and vaccines.
