PESHAWAR – The health department of the country’s northwestern region Khyber Pakhtunkhwa sounded an alert on Tuesday to curb the spread of the Nipah virus that caused only a few known outbreaks in Asia but the mortality rate of patients stands at over 70 percent.
After Punjab, and Sindh, the KP government also issued a warning in response to concerns about the potential spread of the Nipah virus.
The alert directed concerned officials to take all preventive measures to curb the virus’s spread. Health Department alerted all District Health Officers and Medical Superintendents of the Nipah virus’s close vicinity in neighboring India.
It directed the district health office and other organizations to quarantine patients who contracted the virus, to ensure that cases were reported in a timely manner and stressed sharing data on centralized system.
Nipah Virus Symptoms
Nipah Virus infection is a contagious zoonotic disease that is transmitted from animals to humans. The illness spreads through contaminated food or directly from an infected person to another person.
Fruit bats are the first host of the dangerous virus. It can also be transmitted from pigs to humans, while human-to-human spread has also been detected.
Like many other viruses, Nipah virus patients can be asymptomatic, and in the active phase it can cause respiratory infections and deadly brain infection.
Major symptoms include fever, myalgia, headaches, sore throat, and nausea, while the advance stage disease can cause consciousness, drowsiness, dizziness, and neurological signs.
Brain inflammation (Encephalitis) and seizures have been seen in some cases. The incubation period of Nipah virus is from 4 to 14 days but has also been as long as month.
The mortality rate of the zoonotic disease is over 70percent while no vaccine or drugs have been developed to treat Nipah virus infection.
Nipah virus alert: Sindh issues advisory to curb spread of dangerous Zoonotic disease
