Over a three-year period, 35 people in China have contracted a newly discovered virus. The pathogen with the name Langya henipavirus, LayV for short, has so far only been detected in people who have had contact with animals. The known infections occurred in the east Chinese provinces of Shangdong and Henan. This is reported by an international research team led by Xiao-Ai Zhang from the Chinese Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology in Beijing in the New England Journal of Medicine.
At the end of 2018, the researchers discovered the pathogen for the first time in the throat swab of a 53-year-old woman with fever and previous contact with animals. They then tested patients in three Chinese hospitals for the henipa virus. By 2021, they were able to detect it in 35 feverish people who had come into contact with animals in the past month. Those affected reported flu-like symptoms such as tiredness, coughing, muscle pain, nausea and vomiting, and even pneumonia. In some cases, liver and kidney function was impaired; furthermore, the immune cells in the blood of some of those affected were reduced. No deaths were known. The researchers could not clearly prove that the Langya virus was the trigger for the symptoms. According to them, however, this is supported by the fact that 26 of the 35 patients were not infected with any other pathogens at the time of the illness. In addition, most of those affected had antibodies against the virus after surviving the infection.
How exactly the virus spreads is not certain. There was no evidence of direct human-to-human transmission; the known victims were not in contact with each other and close family members were not infected either. The authors of the study write that the infections therefore probably occurred sporadically. They assume that the pathogen was transmitted from animals to humans: the researchers were also able to detect the same Langya henipa virus in shrews. The small rodents may serve as a reservoir for the pathogen.