Langya virus

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.

There is currently no vaccine or treatment for Henipavirus and the only treatment is supportive care to manage complications. There is currently no vaccine or treatment for the virus 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.

Nearly three dozen people in China have been sickened by a newly identified virus from the same family as the deadly Nipah and Hendra viruses, ...

The newly discovered virus is a “phylogenetically distinct Henipavirus”, according to a recent study — A Zoonotic Henipavirus in Febrile Patients in China — ...

The authors of the study have underlined that the sample size of their investigation is too small to determine human-to-human transmission. The patients were accompanied by abnormalities of “thrombocytopenia (35%), leukopenia (54%), impaired liver (35%) and kidney (8%) function”, the study noted. In all likelihood, the new virus has jumped from an animal to humans. The types of Henipaviruses that had been identified prior to this included Hendra, Nipah, Cedar, Mojiang and the Ghanaian bat virus. Langya was discovered in eastern China during surveillance testing of patients who had fever along with a recent history of animal exposure. Langya Henipavirus: Almost three years after the novel coronavirus was detected in China, a new zoonotic virus has been discovered in the country’s two eastern provinces with 35 infections identified so far.

Scientists detected another potential zoonotic spillover nearly three years into the coronavirus pandemic, though evidence suggests very low fatality rates.

Among the 35 patients, 26 were found to be infected only with the Langya virus. Two are considered highly virulent and are associated with high case-fatality ratios, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But none of the Langya patients died, the study stated. Over a roughly two-year period, 34 other people were found to have been infected in Shandong and neighboring Henan, with the vast majority being farmers.

Chinese scientists say a new 'LayV' virus that has sickened dozens likely emerged in shrews.

“But it is yet another reminder of the looming threat caused by the many pathogens circulating in populations of wild and domestic animals that have the potential to infect humans.” But the scientists said the sample size of patients is too small to completely rule out human-to-human transmission. The scientists believe that the virus likely emerged in shrews, small mammals, who then passed it on to humans.

There have been 35 cases of Langya virus across two provinces in China and it is unclear whether it is treatable.

"A serosurvey of domestic animals detected seropositivity in goats (3 of 168 [2 percent]) and dogs (4 of 79 [5 percent])," the letter said. "Among 25 species of wild small animals surveyed, LayV RNA was predominantly detected in shrews (71 of 262 [27 percent]), a finding that suggests that the shrew may be a natural reservoir of LayV." It said that of the 26 patients who were infected with Langya alone, had a fever, 54 percent were experiencing fatigue, 50 percent had a cough, 46 percent had muscle aches and pain, 38 percent had nausea, and 35 percent had a headache. The Nipah virus is zoonotic, having evolved in fruit bats. This new virus is a close relative of a previously reported, extremely deadly, Nipah virus. Half of the patients had anorexia, while 35 percent developed thrombocytopenia—a condition where the platelet count in the blood drops too low.

Less than three years after the outbreak of COVID-19 started in China, the threat of the new animal-borne LayV virus has been identified.

According to the Chinese scientists, contact tracing of 9 patients with 15 close-contact family members revealed no transmission of the virus. But as none of the patients in China had close contact with each other, experts believe that the transmission of the virus from animal to human is still sporadic. The most common symptom of the Langya virus appears to be a fever (experienced by all patients), but those infected with the virus also reported fatigue (54 per cent of patients), loss of appetite (50 per cent), muscle pain (46 per cent), cough (50 per cent), nausea (38 per cent), headache and vomiting (35 per cent) after contracting the virus.

At least 35 patients across 2 Chinese provinces have been infected with the phylogenetically distinct Langya henipavirus (LayV), according to a report in ...

LayV is most closely phylogenetically related to Mojiang henipavirus, a virus with a genome length of 18404 nt originally discovered in southern China. The Langya virus is comprised of 18402 nucleotides with genomic organization identical to other henipaviruses. Though the sample size is small, they suspect Langya virus was hosted by shrews before infecting humans.

Thirty five people are known to have been infected by Langya henipavirus in the Shandong and Henan provinces of China between December 2018 and May 2021.

Nevertheless, he says the most likely source of any future pandemic will be a virus that jumps from animals to humans. The researchers found no evidence of close contact between the people infected with the virus. The researchers mention that some of the infected people had pneumonia, but don’t specify how many or give details on its severity. The researchers tested 25 species of small wild animals for the virus. The Nipah virus, first identified in 1999 in Malaysia, is also part of this genus. The genus includes the Hendra virus, which was first identified in Australia in 1994 and is known to infect humans and horses.