Langya virus: Symptoms, cases, how fatal it is and what scientists say

A new virus Langya henipavirus (LayV) has infected 35 people in China’s Shandong and Henan provinces.

According to scientists, the people were infected with the new virus over the period between 2018 and 2021.

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Langya is related to Hendra and Nipah viruses, which cause disease in humans. Researchers in China first detected this new virus as part of routine surveillance in people with a fever who had reported recent contact with animals. Once the virus was identified, the researchers looked for the virus in other people, according to a report on The Conversation.

Symptoms

Symptoms reported appeared to be mostly mild – fever, fatigue, cough, loss of appetite, muscle aches, nausea and headache – although we don’t know how long the patients were unwell. A smaller proportion had potentially more serious complications, including pneumonia, and abnormalities in liver and kidney function. However, the severity of these abnormalities, the need for hospitalisation, and whether any cases were fatal were not reported, it added.

Langya is a zoonotic virus (it is transmitted from animals to humans).

“The only henipavirus that has shown some sign of human-to-human transmission is the Nipah virus and that requires very close contact,” Olivier Restiff of the University of Cambridge was quoted as saying in a New Scientist report. “I don’t think this has much pandemic potential.”

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According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Nipah virus can be transmitted to humans from animals (such as bats or pigs), or contaminated foods and can also be transmitted directly from human-to-human. Fruit bats of the Pteropodidae family are the natural host of Nipah virus.

In a report titled ‘A Zoonotic Henipavirus in Febrile Patients in China’ published in the New England Journal of Medicine said that a new henipavirus associated with a febrile human illness was identified in China. This was the first scientific research published on Langya virus.

As per the study, this virus was also found in shrews. The study said the patients developed symptoms including fever (100%), fatigue (54%), cough (50%), loss of appetite (50%), muscle pain (46%), nausea (38%), headache (35%) and vomiting (35%). They also showed a decrease in white blood cells (54%), low platelet count (35%), liver failure (35%) and kidney failure (8%).

The LayV genome shows that the virus is most closely related to Mojiang henipavirus, which was first isolated in rats in an abandoned mine in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan in 2012. Henipaviruses belong to the Paramyxoviridae family of viruses, which includes measles, mumps and many respiratory viruses that infect people. Several other henipaviruses have been discovered in bats, rats and shrews, from Australia to South Korea and China, but only Hendra, Nipah, and now LayV are known to infect people, as per a Nature report.

Not fatal

Scientists said they are not overly concerned because the virus doesn’t seem to spread easily between people, nor is it fatal.

The research team that identified LayV did so while monitoring patients at three hospitals in the eastern Chinese provinces of Shandong and Henan between April 2018 and August 2021. Participants were recruited into the study if they had a fever, the study said.

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The team sequenced the LayV genome from a throat swab taken from the first patient identified with the disease, a 53-year-old woman. The virus was named after a town called Langya, in Shandong, where she was from, says co-author Linfa Wang, a virologist at Duke–National University of Singapore Medical School in Singapore.

The researchers did not find strong evidence of LayV spreading between people — there were no clusters of cases in the same family, within a short time span or in close geographical proximity. “Of the 35 cases, not a single one is linked,” says Wang.

Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Deputy Director-General Chuang Jen-hsiang said according to the study, human-to-human transmission of the virus has not been reported, and that a serological survey of domestic animals found 2% of the tested goats (168) and 5% of the tested dogs (79) were positive, as per a Taipei Times report.

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Test results from 25 wild animal species suggest that the shrew might be a natural reservoir of the Langya henipavirus, as the virus was found in 27% of the shrew subjects, he said.

‘Tip of the iceberg’

“We are hugely underestimating the number of these zoonotic cases in the world, and this (Langya virus) is just the tip of the iceberg,” said emerging virus expert Leo Poon, a professor at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health, according to a CNN report.