The Nipah virus is an RNA virus that typically presents with flu-like symptoms, including fever, headache, cough, sore throat, and muscle pain. Sometimes, or many times, it goes to the brain, causing encephalitis. The patient can experience seizures, drowsiness, confusion, go into a coma, and many times they may die because of the disease. The mortality rate ranges between 50-75% for someone suffering from the virus.

The disease is divided into two parts: one is the early symptoms, and one is the late symptoms. For early symptoms, this is a non-specific respiratory symptom, and severe symptoms are main symptoms like convulsion, coma, and death.

It is a very lethal disease transmitted from bats, and we call it a ‘fruit bat’.The bat that feeds on the food is the actual pathogen, and they is the transmitting bat for the disease. The patient can either be infected indirectly from bat to pig transmission or directly be infected. Transmission is common from an infected to a non-infected individual in a hospital or healthcare setting. That is the reason we need to inculcate proper asepsis or proper infection control practices. If a patient comes displaying any of the above-mentioned symptoms, even if they are non-specific, we take their case because every individual is a potential patient for respiratory illness, as it takes a few days to experience a headache or seizures.

First step is to isolate the patient in a room, and we must follow strict infection control practices. Secondly, we must wear Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), which includes your N95 mask, gloves, gowns, among other equipment. We have already received the guidelines from the government, and they were already implemented the day before yesterday. The team at CMRI is ready to accept any respiratory illness patient, irrespective of them having any sort of neurological manifestation.

After isolating the patient, if the disease has progressed to a higher level, there is a need for sample collections and to send the samples to the concerned department where the testing takes place.

We do not need to panic as there are only a handful of cases. We only have to worry if it spreads to the next level; otherwise, till then, there is no problem. We must follow the basic protocols and guidelines, and we have to carry on with the process.

Thank you.

About the author- Dr. Deep Narayan Mukherjee, consultant clinical microbiology and infectious diseases, CK Birla Hospitals, CMRI