A teenager in India has died from an incurable brain virus that experts fear could trigger the next pandemic.
The 14-year-old student was diagnosed with the Nipah virus in the southern state of Kerala and died after suffering cardiac arrest.
Authorities are now monitoring 214 people, 60 of whom are believed to be at high risk of contracting the virus.
The Nipah virus is part of the paramyxovirus family, which also includes measles and mumps. Experts fear it may be “lying dormant” before triggering the next global outbreak.
Data shows that three out of four people who contract the virus die from it, a much higher rate than the current Covid mortality rate, which is less than one per cent. There is also no vaccine or treatment for the disease. This comes after another outbreak in the state in September, which was the largest known globally to date, with 30 people infected.
One of the viruses, the Nipah virus, can infect cells with receptors that regulate what enters or leaves cells lining the central nervous system and vital organs. This variant has a mortality rate of up to 75 percent compared to Covid’s, which is much lower than 1 percent.
Doctors have tried to play down 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 for infection to occur.
Patients contract the virus through contact with feces, blood or saliva of an infected person. It can also be transmitted through respiratory droplets from patients.
Confirming the death, state health minister Veena George told television reporters: “The infected child died on Sunday after a cardiac arrest.”
It was not clear at the time how the boy became infected or how long it took him to die from the virus.
But most often, people become infected by touching pig droppings, which are then infected by consuming food or water contaminated with fruit bat droppings. The disease can also be contracted by eating contaminated fruit.
Patients suffer from fever, cough, sore throat and difficulty breathing because the virus infects the respiratory tract.
Scientists note that unlike influenza and Covid-19, which “change shape rapidly,” paramyxoviruses do not appear to mutate as they spread, but have become “very good at human-to-human transmission.”
It can then spread to the blood and travel to the brain, where an infection causes encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain that leads to death.
It can also spread to the lungs and cause severe pneumonia, which can also be fatal.
Amid warnings about the disease’s pandemic potential, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases added it to its list of pandemic pathogens to watch out for in October.
It also inspired the 2011 film Contagion, which follows the emergence of a new pandemic virus.
Starring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Winslet, a woman returns home from a business trip to Hong Kong and brings back a deadly microbe that triggered a global pandemic: the disease was the Nipah virus.
“Imagine if a paramyxovirus emerged that was as contagious as measles and as deadly as Nipah,” said Michael Norris, Ph.D., adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, in a statement.
“Flu 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 with paramyxoviruses because most people infected with one of the more than 75 viruses do not survive, making it nearly impossible to develop treatments and vaccines.