Now There Is a “shrew Virus”?
The New England Journal of Medicine reported this week that at least 35 people in northeast China have been infected with a newly named virus, the Langya henipavirus (LayV). Given the past few years, we can all be forgiven for going crazy over the news of a viral outbreak, but thankfully, there’s not much to worry about – it doesn’t seem to be the start of a new COVID or monkeypox. At least that’s how it looks now.
What is LayV, the shrew virus?
LayV, first discovered in 2018, does not appear to be transmitted from person to person. On the contrary, it is a zoonosis transmitted from animal to human. Shrews in China are the likely culprit, and contact between shrews and humans is not as common as between humans, leading to a sporadic infection pattern.
The identified 35 patients, mostly farmers, were infected between 2018 and 2021. Patients infected with LayV suffer from flu-like symptoms: fever, fatigue, cough, muscle soreness, and so on. No deaths have been reported.
“Contact tracing of nine patients with 15 close-contact family members did not reveal close-contact transmission of LayV,” the report says. This is good news, although it does not completely rule out the possibility of human-to-human transmission: “Our sample size was too small to determine the status of human-to-human transmission of the LayV virus.”
Dr. Benhur Lee, professor of microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, summarized the outbreak on Twitter :
“There is strong evidence that LayV has been sporadically transmitted to humans from shrews, causing pneumonia and flu-like symptoms. No deaths have been reported and there is no evidence of further human transmission. Constant monitoring is important. Reservoirs can be found!