‘Nipah virus is a biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) pathogen that causes severe respiratory illness and encephalitis in humans’ [1] that orginates in bats [2]. It was first isolated in Malaysia and Singapore in 1999 - ‘late September 1998 and by mid-June 1999, more than 265 encephalitis cases, including 105 deaths, had been reported in Malaysia, and 11 cases of encephalitis or respiratory illness with one death had been reported in Singapore’ [3]. It keeps recurring in Bangladesh [4]. There was a 2018 outbreak in Kerala, India [5]. There seems to have been a simultaneous outbreak in Wuhan during Covid19 - which never got reported, and apparently resolved by itself.Metagenome from the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid of 5 Covid19 [6–8] patients from Wuhan (Accid:PRJNA605983) which showed very little SAR-Cov2 viral load (in the tens per million reads) in my analysis earlier [9].The metagenome also shows the co-infection with Nipah henipavirus virus in 4 out of 5 patients. The sequences are in SI:Nipah.fa - 167 reads in all.One can almost assemble the full genome (about 18kbps) from it. It seems to have originated from Bangladesh, though I have not done the phylogeny. Most reads are 100% identical, but some are (97% - 145/150).Maybe, we have looking for the wrong virus in the rest of the world - since Nipah is endemic to Southeast Asia, which seems to have been the least affected in Covid19.
CMV viral load in bronchoalveolar lavage for diagnosis of pneumonia in allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation
