One of two nurses infected with the Nipah virus in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district died on Thursday afternoon, The Hindu reported.
The two nurses, a 25-year-old woman and a 25-year-old man, were infected with the virus in the Barasat area in North 24 Parganas district on January 11. While the man recovered and was discharged from hospital last week, the woman remained critical for several days afterwards.
The woman tested negative for Nipah on February 8, but had by then developed sepsis, The Telegraph quoted an unidentified state health department official as saying. She died after a cardiac arrest on Thursday.
This was the first death of a Nipah patient in West Bengal since 2007, when an outbreak of the virus took place in the state, the health official was quoted as saying.
This is the seventh documented Nipah outbreak in India and the third in West Bengal, following outbreaks in Siliguri in 2001 and Nadia in 2007. The last reported outbreak of the disease in the country was in Kerala in August.
On February 6, the World Health Organization confirmed that one person had died in Bangladesh after contracting the Nipah virus.
At a press briefing in Geneva on Wednesday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that three cases of the virus had been detected in India and Bangladesh in recent weeks.
“The two outbreaks are not related although both occurred along the India-Bangladesh border,” The Hindu quoted him as saying. “WHO is working with India and Bangladesh for risk assessment, follow-up of contacts and community engagement.”
The global health body said its assessment did not indicate a broader outbreak or transmission of the virus.
The Nipah virus is a zoonotic illness transferred from animals such as pigs and fruit bats to humans. The virus can also be caught through human-to-human transmission.
It causes fever and cold-like symptoms in patients. The infection can also cause encephalitis, which is the inflammation of the brain, and myocarditis, or the inflammation of the heart, in some cases.
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