Langya henipavirus: why the new virus detected in China is not alarming

After the Covid, already a new pandemic?

Several articles published on Tuesday report that a new virus that has sickened 35 people has been identified in China.

But what some media that talk about this discovery do not say is that these 35 patients were taken care of from April 2018 to August 2021. It is therefore not an ongoing epidemic in recent weeks .

It all starts with a study by researchers from universities or institutes in China, Singapore and Australia, published on August 4 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

They were looking for possible zoonoses, that is to say diseases transmitted by animals to humans.

Their survey was carried out in three Chinese hospitals, from April 2018 to August 2021, with patients suffering from acute fever (≥38°C) and who had been exposed to animals in the month before the onset of symptoms.

A new zoonotic virus called Langya henipavirus (LayV) has been characterised.

35 cases in humans have been found so far in 2 Chinese provinces.

The first human infection identified dates back to 2018. Thus, it is not spreading fast in humans.

1/https://t.co/h638Idc8Fe pic.twitter.com/px8cAoJHwm

— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) August 9, 2022

A new virus of the henipavirus genus of the Paramyxoviridae family, baptized Langya henipavirus (LayV), has been identified.

35 patients infected with the latter, including 26 only by this one, have been identified in three years.

These 26 patients were 60 years old on average.

All had a fever, half of them were victims of fatigue, cough or muscle pain.

A third had headaches.

These symptoms were quite severe, but none of these patients apparently died.

"Sporadic" infection in the human population?

Following an epidemiological investigation of these Langya henipavirus-infected patients, “there was no close contact or common exposure history,” write the authors.

This “suggests that infection in the human population may be sporadic”.

To find out which animal is the source of all these contaminations, the scientists went to investigate in the village of residence of the patients.

Among all the small wild species studied, the shrew stands out as a potential natural reservoir of Langya henipavirus.

“If there is no human-to-human transmission, it is difficult to imagine an epidemic because not everyone is exposed to shrews”, comments François Balloux, director of the Institute of Genetics. at University College London.

Read alsoMonkey pox and “retro-zoonosis”: why patients should not be around their pets

Origin in China, virus originally transmitted by an animal… The scientist says he “understands the fears generated” by this discovery and “the fact that people see a parallel with SARS-CoV-2”.

The Nipah virus, also of the henipavirus genus, is known to be able to be transmitted between humans and its lethality rate is 40 to 75%, according to the World Health Organization.

“But at this stage, with 35 cases

in three years, there is no strong circulation and all this has nothing to do with Covid-19”, reassures François Balloux.

The study authors believe that "this finding warrants further investigation to better understand the human disease" associated with these infections.

Above all, this emergence is a reminder that viruses potentially dangerous to humans can be transmitted by animals.