Geneva (TDI): The World Health Organization (WHO) has assessed the risk of the Nipah virus spreading as low, following the recent confirmation of three cases in India and Bangladesh.
Nipah is a rare but deadly virus transmitted from animals to humans, with no approved vaccine and a case fatality rate of 40 to 75 percent, depending on the quality of local healthcare.
Speaking at a press briefing in Geneva on Wednesday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the recent cases, two in India’s West Bengal state and one in Bangladesh, where the patient died, raised concerns but did not indicate a wider outbreak.
He noted that the two outbreaks were unrelated, though both occurred along the India-Bangladesh border and share similar ecological conditions, including populations of fruit bats known to be natural Nipah virus reservoirs.
Nipah virus infection can range from asymptomatic cases to severe illness. Symptoms often include high fever, vomiting, and respiratory complications, while serious cases may involve seizures and brain inflammation that can lead to coma.
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Although human-to-human transmission is possible, it occurs infrequently, and outbreaks are typically small and contained, experts say.
Candidate vaccines are currently in development, but none have yet received approval. Nipah was first identified in 1998 among pig farmers in Malaysia.
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In India, the virus was first reported in West Bengal in 2001, and outbreaks have occurred intermittently since then, including a 2018 outbreak in Kerala that killed at least 17 people, and two deaths in the same state in 2023.
WHO continues to monitor the situation closely but emphasized that the overall risk of regional or global spread remains low.
