Researchers claim that the Langya virus in China may only be the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of potential infections

• The discovery of a novel virus in dozens of individuals in eastern China may not be the start of the next pandemic, but it does highlight how readily viruses may go undetected from animals to people, according to scientists.
• Scientists who suspect the virus, known as Langya henipavirus, may have passed directly or indirectly to people from shrews, small mole-like rodents prevalent in a range of settings, say it sickened nearly three dozen farmers and other locals.
• The infection was found in 35 unrelated fever patients in hospitals in Shandong and Henan provinces between 2018 and 2021, according to the experts.

The discovery of a novel virus in dozens of individuals in eastern China may not be the start of the next pandemic, but it does highlight how readily viruses may go undetected from animals to people, according to scientists.

Scientists who suspect the virus, known as Langya henipavirus, may have passed directly or indirectly to people from shrews, small mole-like rodents prevalent in a range of settings, say it sickened nearly three dozen farmers and other locals.

The infection was found in 35 unrelated fever patients in hospitals in Shandong and Henan provinces between 2018 and 2021, according to the experts. This finding is consistent with long-standing scientific warnings that animal viruses routinely infect people around the world without being noticed.

The Langya virus is simply the tip of the iceberg, according to emerging virus expert Leo Poon, a professor at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health who was not involved in the most recent study. “We are greatly underestimating the number of these zoonotic instances in the world,” he said.

Due to the increased worry about illness outbreaks, the first scientific study on the virus was published as communication by a group of Chinese and foreign academics in the New England Journal of Medicine last week. Since the unique coronavirus that caused the epidemic was initially discovered in China over three years ago, hundreds of thousands of new Covid-19 cases are still being reported daily throughout the world.

There is, however, no proof that the Langya virus is contagious or that it was the root of a local outbreak of related cases, according to the researchers. To exclude human-to-human dissemination, more research on a broader proportion of patients is required, they stressed.

The new virus is unlikely to develop into “another ‘disease X’ event,” such as a previously undiscovered pathogen that causes an epidemic or pandemic, but it “does demonstrate that such zoonotic spillover events happen more often than we think or know,” said veteran emerging infectious disease scientist Linfa Wang, who was a member of the research team,

According to Wang, a professor at the Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School, “it is vitally necessary to conduct active surveillance in a transparent and internationally collaborative fashion” to lessen the possibility that a new virus could cause a health emergency.

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