new infectious disease. Here’s what you need to know about Langya virus and how it spreads. And, if infectious disease experts think it’s time to worry.Langya henipavirus is a newly-identified zoonotic disease—meaning, it’s a virus that jumps from animals to humans.
“Henipavirus is a genus of viruses in the Paramyxoviridae family that include both Hendra and Nipah viruses,” says Amesh A. Adalja, M.D., a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Hendravirus and Nipah viruses are “much more lethal,” says Thomas Russo, M.D., professor and chief of infectious disease at the University at Buffalo in New York.
Still, “any time a new virus is found to be capable of infecting humans and causing illness, it is concerning—especially if the virus comes from a viral family known to be efficient at infected humans as the Paramyxoviridae family are,” Dr. Adalja says.paper, the virus seems to be transmitted from animals to humans. The researchers tested a slew of wild animals and found that more than 25% of 262 shrews tested also had the virus.
Dr. Schaffner stresses, though, that the virus “is not so far known to be transmitted from human to human.” Meaning, that a person catches it from an infected animal and then the virus doesn’t spread farther.In general, Langya henipavirus “produces relatively mild influenza-like illness,” Dr. Schaffner says. The paper specifically notes that people had the following symptoms:
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