A new type of animal-derived Henipavirus has so far infected people in Shandong and Henan provinces of China, official media here reported on Tuesday. The new type of Henipavirus (also named Langya henipavirus, LayV) was found in throat swab samples from febrile patients in eastern China, state-run Global Times quoted media reports.

Scholars who participated in the study pointed out that this newly discovered Henipavirus, which may have come from animals, is associated with some febrile cases, and the infected people have symptoms including fever, fatigue, cough, anorexia, myalgia, and nausea. There is currently no vaccine or treatment for Henipavirus and the only treatment is supportive care to manage complications.

The cases of Langya henipavirus so far have not been fatal or very serious, so there is no need for panic, Wang Linfa, a Professor in the Programme in Emerging Infectious Diseases at Duke-NUS Medical School who was involved in the study said, adding that it is still a cause for alert as many viruses that exist in nature have unpredictable results when they infect humans.

Further investigation found that 26 out of 35 cases of Langya Henipavirus infection in Shandong and Henan provinces have developed clinical symptoms such as fever, irritability, cough, anorexia, myalgia, nausea, headache and vomiting, the report said.

Animal origin

To determine the potential animal origin of the virus, the researchers tested goats, dogs, pigs and cattle living in the villages of infected patients for antibodies against LayV, and took tissue and urine samples from 25 species of wild small animals to look for the presence of LayV RNA. They found LayV antibodies in a handful of goats and dogs, and identified LayV viral RNA in 27% of the 262 sampled shrews. This suggested that shrews are a reservoir for the virus, passing LayV between themselves “and somehow infecting people here and there by chance”, says  Emily Gurley, an infectious-diseases epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. But it is not clear how people were infected in the first place — whether directly from shrews or an intermediate animal, says Gurley. A lot of research still needs to be done to work out how the virus is spreading in shrews and how people are getting infected, she says. Holmes says there is an urgent need for a global surveillance system to detect virus spillovers and rapidly communicate those results to avoid more pandemics, such as the one sparked by COVID-19. “These sorts of zoonotic spillover events happen all the time,” he says. “The world needs to wake up.”