Is this the new killer virus? Nipha virus kills half of all infected! It can get worse than Corona!


Is this the new killer virus? The Nipah virus, which kills at least half of its victims, is one of the world’s next pandemic threats, an expert has warned. Oxford vaccine developer Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert said there was no vaccine against the virus, which causes brain swelling and we must act now!

More dangerous than Corona!

However, should it spread more rapidly, as it has with Covid, the consequences could be catastrophic. Dr Gilbert said: ‘Everyone is now aware of how quickly SARS-CoV-2 has spread around the world. “It has mutated, it has evolved and we now have the delta variant which is very transmissible. “If we get a delta variant of the Nipah virus, then all of a sudden we have a highly transmissible virus with a 50 percent mortality rate.

At an event as part of the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Dame Sarah said her team was struggling to raise the money needed to develop vaccines for diseases already known, let alone those yet to emerge.

Vaccine development stalls!

Before starting work on the Oxford and AstraZeneca-developed vaccine last January, she had worked on vaccines for Nipah virus, Lassa fever and Mers.

But since the pandemic, her work has gone “backwards.”

Dr. Gilbert said, “We learned from the pandemic that we can do things faster and better, and we want to apply those lessons, but we have yet to put the resources in place to do that. “We need to have stocks of vaccines against these pathogens that we already know about, because what does it look like if all of a sudden there is a major Nipah outbreak around the world?

“We’ve known this for years and we started developing a vaccine five years ago, but we haven’t finished it, it’s not ready yet.

Nipha high on endangered list

.

Nipah is high on the list of ten priority diseases identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as potential sources of future epidemics. The health agency said in 2018 there was “an urgent need for accelerated research and development for the Nipah virus”. Scientists have previously told The Sun that Nipah “could well be the cause of a new pandemic”. The southern Indian state of Kerala had to halt a possible outbreak of the virus in September.

This came after a 12-year-old boy died from the disease, after which hundreds of close contacts were isolated.

Employees also infected

.

Two health care workers who cared for the boy were hospitalized.

The virus can initially cause fever, headache and respiratory symptoms before leading to brain swelling and coma.

This was the fifth outbreak of the virus in India since 2001, according to the WHO, with the others occurring in Southeast Asia.

Outbreaks usually occur when humans contract Zipah from an animal, making it a so-called zoonosis.

Cases are attributed to contact with sick pigs or eating fruit contaminated with saliva or urine from infected bats.

Places such as Cambodia, Indonesia, Madagascar, the Philippines and Thailand may be at risk because of known bat territories.

Beliebteste Artikel Aktuell: