Late last September (1998) pig farmers were coming down with high fever and encephalitis (a swelling of the brain). Some of these farmers died from the infection. So far a total of 258 cases of this disease have been reported by health officials in Malaysia. One hundred of those people died.
Initially, Malaysian health officials believed the patients were infected with a virus called Japanese Encephalitis virus. This virus is transmitted by the bite of mosquitoes and can grow in pigs. Efforts by the Malaysian government to eliminate the spread of the disease by killing the mosquitoes did not work. Japanese Encephalitis virus also does not kill pigs and usually only causes disease in young children.
However, several differences between this outbreak of encephalitis and Japanese Encephalitis virus infections were demonstrated. This particular virus infection was making the pigs sick and killing them as well as making the pig farmers ill. Other scientists argued that if the disease was being transmitted by mosquitoes, as it is with the Japanese Encephalitis virus, they would have seen other family members getting sick as well as those that worked closely with the pigs. In this outbreak of encephalitis only people who worked closely with pigs were getting sick. The scientists also noticed that both adults and children were getting sick.
Regardless of what the Malaysian health officials were saying the evidence pointed to a new viral agent being responsible for this outbreak. The virus was isolated from the blood of several people with the disease and it was shown to be similar to the Hendra virus. The Hendra virus killed two people and more than a dozen horses in Australia in 1994.
The United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that 11 blood samples from abattoir workers (slaughter house) in Singapore tested positive for this Hendra-like virus. These particular workers had worked on pigs imported from Malaysia.
This Hendra-like virus was genetically different enough from the Hendra virus that it was given its own name. This newly emerging and deadly infectious agent has been called the Nipah virus. The Nipah virus has been placed in the same family of viruses as the Hendra virus (paramyxovirus family).
So far it appears that the Nipah virus only spreads from pig to human and NO human to human or mosquito to human transmissions have been reported.
As a result over 800,000 Malaysian pigs have been killed to stop this outbreak of encephalitis. The outbreak as of May 1999 appears to be almost over. This disease does NOT pose a threat to the general public of Malaysia. Tourists to Malaysia need not worry about getting this disease either.
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