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Health officials are on high alert after a new virus outbreak was reported in the People’s Republic of China.
According to Taiwan’s Center for Disease Control, at least 35 people have been infected with Langya henipavirus (LayV) in northeastern China’s Shandong and Henan provinces.
The health agency cited a recent study from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) titled “Zoonotic henipaviruses in febrile patients in China.”
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Researchers who monitored the infection found that LayV symptoms appeared similar to the flu, including fever, cough, headache, muscle aches, fatigue, loss of appetite and nausea.
Twenty-six of the 35 patients were said to be infected only with LayV, implying that no other pathogen was present.
“These 26 patients had fever (100% of patients), fatigue (54%), cough (50%), anorexia (50%), myalgia (46%), nausea (38%), headache. (35%), and with vomiting (35%), thrombocytopenia (35%), leukopenia (54%), and abnormal liver (35%) and renal (8%) function ‘ writes the researcher.
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Infected LayV patients reportedly had “a history of recent animal exposure in eastern China,” according to the study abstract.
Medical experts detected the new virus in a throat swab sample that was subjected to “metagenomic analysis followed by virus isolation.”
The genome of LayV is reported to consist of 18,402 nucleotides and has an identical genomic organization to other henipaviruses of the Paramyxoviridae family, also known as a family of single-stranded RNA viruses.
Henipaviruses can infect humans and cause fatal illness, according to NEJM research. These viruses are commonly found in bats, rodents, and shrews.
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To date, there has been no human-to-human transmission of LayV and no close contact between patients.
“Human infections may be sporadic,” the researchers wrote. “Although contact tracing of 9 patients with family members of 15 close contacts did not reveal LayV infection in her close contact, our sample size was too small to suggest that LayV We were unable to determine the status of human-to-human transmission.”
The study notes that further evaluation needs to be performed to see if LayV may cross-react with Mojiang virus, another henipavirus that can cause fatal pneumonia. doing.
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The detection of LayV comes at a time when most of the world is battling continued COVID-19 infections and containment of monkeypox.