India’s top health agencies, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the National Center for Disease Control (NCDC), are tracking a hantavirus outbreak on a luxury cruise ship after reports of two Indians among the crew, although the risk of a local outbreak in India is small, a senior government official said.
“India has nothing to worry about – the disease is not spreading like influenza. However, concerned agencies, such as ICMR and the National Center for Disease Control, are closely monitoring and communicating with WHO experts,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The confirmation comes against the backdrop of the World Health Organization announcing on Friday that the risk to the public from the deadly Hantavirus strain in the cruise ship outbreak was minimal, because it spreads only through “very close contact.” “This is a dangerous virus, but only for the person who is already infected, and the risk to the general population is still quite low,” Christian Lindmeier, a WHO spokesman, said at a press conference in Geneva.
This disease is also rare in India.
The only Hantavirus serotype indigenous to India is Thottapalayam virus, which was 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 an insect-eating shrew, Suncus murinus, captured in Vellore, southern India, during field studies of Japanese encephalitis.
Since then, only a few people have tested positive for the disease, all from southern India.
According to a 2008 article in the Indian Journal of Molecular Microbiology, a seroepidemiological study from CMC, Vellore, indicated a prevalence of Hantavirus infection of 4% in India.
In 2007, a 46-year-old quarry worker tested positive in Andhra Pradesh, but the largest cluster was in 2008 when 28 rat and snake catchers were found infected in Vellore, according to a 2008 article in the journal Nature.
However, of all the cases reported so far in India, there have been no cases of human-to-human transmission.
The researchers also acknowledge that the true picture may be slightly different due to the lack of readily available diagnostic tools and the possibility that doctors may not notice symptoms in non-endemic areas of the country.
Hantaviruses are zoonotic viruses transmitted by rodents that can cause two important clinical syndromes: hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) and hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS).
There are HFRS in Europe and Asia and HPS in America. The Indian cases were suffering from acute kidney disease and kidney failure with a high temperature.
According to available research, humans are accidental hosts and become infected via aerosols generated by contaminated urine, feces, and saliva of infected rodents. Rodents are the natural host of these viruses and are persistently infected. Human-to-human infection is rare.
