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Hantavirus infection rare, India has nothing to worry: Govt official
Hantavirus: India has nothing to worry — the disease does not spread like influenza, a senior government official said.
India’s top health agencies, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), are tracking a hantavirus outbreak on a luxury cruise ship following reports that two Indians are among the crew, though the risk of a local outbreak in India is minimal, a senior government official said.
“India has nothing to worry — the disease does not spread like influenza. However, agencies concerned, such as ICMR and NCDC, are keeping a close watch and are in touch with the World Health Organisation experts,” the official, who spoke on conditions of anonymity, said.
“Information received through IHR channels indicates that two Indian nationals are currently on board the vessel. Both individuals are presently asymptomatic and are under observation in accordance with established international health protocols,” the official added.
The assertion comes against the backdrop of WHO declaring on Friday that the risk to the public of a deadly hantavirus strain in a cruise ship outbreak was minimal, since it spreads only through “very close contact”. “This is a dangerous virus, but only to the person who’s really infected, and the risk to the general population remains absolutely low,” WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier told a press briefing in Geneva, according to news agency AFP.
Also, the disease is rare in India.
The only hantavirus serotype indigenous to India is the Thottapalayam virus, isolated in 1964 from Christian Medical College, Vellore, Tamil Nadu. Research papers have documented the isolation of the first indigenous hantavirus in a non-rodent species in the country in 1966 at Christian Medical College, Vellore. The virus was isolated from the spleen of a shrew (insectivore), Suncus murinus, captured in Vellore, South India, during field studies of Japanese encephalitis.
Since then, only a handful of humans have tested positive, all from south India.
According to a 2008 paper published in the Indian Journal of Molecular Microbiology, a seroepidemiological study from CMC, Vellore, indicated a 4% prevalence of hantavirus infections in India.
In 2007, a 46-year-old quarry worker was found to be positive in Andhra Pradesh, but the largest cohort was in 2008 when 28 rat and snake catchers were found to be infected in Vellore, according to a 2008 article published in the journal Nature.
However, among all the reported cases so far in India, none are human-to-human transmission cases.
Researchers also acknowledge that the real picture may be slightly different due to a lack of readily available diagnostic tools and the possibility that clinicians may miss symptoms in non-endemic regions of the country.
Hantaviruses are zoonotic rodent-borne viruses and can cause two important clinical syndromes: hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) and hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS).
HFRS found in Europe and Asia and HPS in America. Indian cases were suffering from severe renal disease and renal failure with high fever.
According to available research, humans are accidental hosts and become infected via aerosols generated by contaminated urine, faeces, and saliva from infected rodents. Rodents are the natural hosts of these viruses and develop persistent infection. Human-to-human infections are rare.
