CDC Investigates Langya Virus Spreading in China; Here's Why You Should Not Panic About the Henipavirus

Taiwan's Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently shared in a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that a new zoonotic virus in eastern China is infecting dozens of people in the Shandong and Henan provinces. The virus is called the Langya virus, a new type of henipavirus suspected to have infected shrews before jumping to humans.

Per Science Times' last report, there were 35 infected patients and 26 of them were not co-infected with another pathogen. These people have symptoms of fever, fatigue, cough, anorexia, myalgia, nausea, as well as headache, and vomiting.

Langya Virus Spreading Zoonotically

According to Live Science, the Langya virus or "LayV" was first detected in a 53-year-old farmer who sought treatment at a hospital in Shandong province in 2018. Subsequent investigation revealed 34 more cases in the province and its neighboring province of Henan between 2018 and 2021, wherein most of them are farmers.

The team reported in the study that they could not find traces of the virus being transmitted between people, which means it spreads zoonotically, a phenomenon known as a spillover event. Through testing different animals to look for the possible natural host of the Langya virus, they found that it is most likely hosted by shrews.

Contagion Live reported that the investigators had isolated acute Langya virus infection after the genomic analysis of one patient's swab sample that was taken during routine surveillance of fever patients in eastern China who recently had a history of animal exposure.

The Langya virus is a henipavirus that contains 18402 nucleotides with a genomic organization similar to other henipaviruses, such as the Hendra and Nipah viruses that are known to infect and cause fatal diseases in humans. It belongs to the family Paramyxoviridae, where Hendra and Nipah viruses originated.

But the Langya virus is most closely phylogenetically related to Mojiang henipavirus, which has a genome length of 18404 nucleotides that was first discovered in southern China.

(Photo : SAM YEH/AFP via Getty Images)
Taiwan's Health and Welfare Minister Chen Shih-chung walks past a logo for the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control (CDC) ahead of the arrival of President Tsai Ing-wen in Taipei on May 19, 2020.

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Why People Should Not Worry about the Langya Virus

A zoonotic spillover event is nothing new and has gotten popular since the pandemic because it is one of the reasons scientists are considering when explaining the origins of COVID-19.

It is usually not necessarily cause for concern until the virus becomes transmissible between humans. Contact tracing of the 15 close contacts, including family members, of nine infected patients in Shandong and Henan showed no signs of the virus. Investigators emphasized the limitations of a small sample size and noted that LayV transmission between human-to-human is unlikely.

"In order to really be something we should be worried about ... it's got to be able to transmit between people," USA Today quoted epidemiologist Emily Gurley from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "There's no evidence from this report that person-to-person transmission is happening."

Virologist Dr. Paul Duprex, the director of the center for vaccine research at the University of Pittsburgh, added that the two other henipavirus, namely Hendra and Nipah viruses, are highly virulent and fatal, but the report says that the Langya virus causes milder disease. Among the henipaviruses, the Cedar, Ghanaian, and Mojiang viruses have not made the jump to humans.