The henipavirus can cause respiratory symptoms and is related to Nipah and Hendra viruses, but cannot spread easily in people.
A new animal virus that can infect people has been identified in eastern China. But scientists say they are not overly concerned because the virus doesn’t seem to spread easily between people, nor is it fatal.
Large outbreaks of infectious diseases typically take off after a lot of false starts, says Emily Gurley, an infectious-diseases epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “If we are actively looking for those sparks, then we are in a much better position to stop or to find something early.”The research team that identified LayV did so while monitoring patients at three hospitals in the eastern Chinese provinces of Shandong and Henan between April 2018 and August 2021.
Throughout the study period, the researchers found 35 people who were infected with LayV, mostly farmers, with symptoms ranging from severe pneumonia to a cough. Most patients said in a questionnaire that they had been exposed to an animal within a month of their symptoms appearing. The researchers did not find strong evidence of LayV spreading between people — there were no clusters of cases in the same family, within a short time span or in close geographical proximity. “Of the 35 cases, not a single one is linked,” says Wang. Gurley says that this is good news, but the study did retrospective contact tracing on only 15 family members of 9 infected individuals, which makes it difficult to determine how exactly the individuals were exposed.
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