Encephalitis, coma and convulsions: As the corona virus continues to spread around the world, the World Health Organization is following with concern the Nipah virus – a deadly virus that first appeared in 1998 in Malaysia and caused the deaths of dozens of people in the East, and has the potential to become the next epidemic.
At this stage there is no suitable treatment for those infected with the virus, as severe symptoms can progress and reach a state of coma within 24 to 48 hours, along with high fever, encephalitis and respiratory problems. However, even those who survive the disease may suffer from lifelong medical consequences. As a result, research institutes in Asia are vigorously engaged in dealing with and researching the virus, which has apparently passed from bats to humans.
Its mortality rates are not yet completely clear but it is estimated that they are high and stand at between 40 and 75 percent, while in the Corona virus the death rate is only about 0.5 percent – according to the latest published data. In addition, it only passes through human contact and does not move in the air, and according to reports in Asia it may incubate in the human body before erupting for up to 45 days.
This means that in the case of a large infection, a relatively small number of human disease spreaders can cause a very large wave of infection before the outbreak is detected. In fact, from the point of view of the World Health Organization, the fan is in the opening ten of burning viruses to investigate and that could be an opening for a severe global epidemic.
The shrinking of wild areas threatens humanity
The swaying virus has come to humanity apparently as a result of the creation of forests and the cultivation of dates for self-consumption. The fruit bats that carry the virus, as well as apparently other species of bats, have been relegated from forests to urban and rural areas. Here the person meets the virus as a result of eating dates that the bats ate, or as a result of drinking fermented date water that the bats drank and even defecated.
Following the contact, this virus jumped to humans as well as food pigs and began to spread. In fact, to date there has been an outbreak of the disease in Malaysia, Bangladesh, Synaphor and India. In all countries where infections have been identified, real efforts have been made to destroy the infected pigs and block contact with any identified patient to prevent a wider outbreak.
How deadly is the virus? In 11 outbreaks in Bangladesh over the years, 196 people have been identified who have contracted the disease, of whom 150 have died.
Super-distributors of diseases
Bats in the wild usually live separately from humans, but the shrinking of their living areas has exposed them to humanity and these are species that are considered super-transmitters of Ebola, Corona, Nifa and the SARS virus, with Corona being the easiest to kill.
Real potential for terrorism
The swift virus is so dangerous that research on it is currently limited in the world to a small number of laboratories, one of them in Thailand, due to the real potential of biological weapons inherent in it. It is a natural, deadly pathogen that can be converted directly into real weapons and therefore its research has been done carefully and under international supervision.
Virus researchers emphasize in relation to it that it is not the only one that exists outside as a pathogen in animals, and that deforestation in the rainforests and jungles of the world will increasingly expose humanity to epidemics and pathogens that will jump from animals to humans. A serious warning about this was recently published by one of the exposers and researchers of the Ebola virus in Africa, who stated in a large article to CNN that “I am constantly confronted with unidentified deadly diseases and my anxiety that one of them will spread more than Ebola and harm.”