Health authorities in India’s Kerala state have issued an alert after a 14-year-old boy died of the Nipah virus.
According to the state’s health minister, an additional 60 people have been identified as being in the high-risk category of having the disease.
The Nipah virus infection is a “zoonotic illness” transmitted from animals like pigs and fruit bats to humans, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The WHO has described the virus as a priority pathogen because of its potential to trigger an epidemic.
From the Wikipedia page it seems that there are small outbreaks every year in the region of origin (India/Malaysia). It seems like the government is quite good at tracking down infected and potentially infected - which is lucky since the mortality rate is above 50%! I wonder what happens if one of the infected jumped on a plane to a completely different place in the world that was not so good at managing it.
The higher the mortality rate the quicker people tend to get it under control. I guess that’s partially because a dead host is less likely to spread the infection, and partly because people take it more seriously than a bad cough.