Nipah Outbreak: Is it the beginning of another pandemic in the era of COVID-19 and Zika
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Main body
Since the early part of December 2019, the entire world is witnessing the challenges of the pandemic of COVID-19 with the Wuhan city, Hubei Province of China being the epicenter of the novel pandemic. By January 2020, India reported the first case of COVID-19 in Kerala through a 20-year-old female returnee from the city of the epicenter. Later in June 2021, the state of Kerala faced the re-emergence of Zika virus outbreak with 65 confirmed cases amid the strict vigilance of COVID-19 protocols (
Why a major concern
Nipah virus belongs to the group of Biosafety Level-4 pathogen associated with high case fatality rate (40–75%) (Singh et al., 2019), whereas the ongoing pandemic of COVID-19 has 1–2% mortality. NiV is a single-stranded, negative-sense RNA virus of 18.2 kb genome encoded by three non-structural and six structural proteins i.e. nucleo-, phosphor-, matrix-, fusion-, glycol-, and RNA polymerase proteins (Wang et al., 2001) Fig. 1. Being an emerging zoonotic virus, it gets transmitted from animals
Containment of 2021 Nipah and lesson learned from previous outbreaks
The experience from the previous Nipah outbreak of 2018 and the current COVID-19 pandemic has taught good lessons towards control measures which have become a boon towards controlling the emergence of the single case of Nipah in 2021. The use of established protocols, contact tracing, restriction in population movement within the infected area, isolation of close contacts, and high-risk exposures effectively possibly have restricted the spread of infection to health care workers and close
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
None. The views expressed are personal and not necessarily the views of the author-affiliated institute.
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