India's Kerala state issues alert after teenager dies from Nipah virus

Parts of southern state earmarked as high-risk zones for disease believed to have originated in bats

A patient suspecting of suffering from a Nipah infection is moved to isolation at Kozhikode Medical College in the Kozhikode district of Kerala on July 20, 2024. Reuters

Health authorities in India’s southern Kerala state issued an alert after a boy died of the Nipah virus and declared 60 people who were in contact with the 14-year-old to be at high risk of being infected.

Nipah is a disease that is believed to originate in bats of the family Pteropodidae who are the natural hosts. They do not suffer illness as a result.

However, an infected person has symptoms including fever, vomiting, headache, and respiratory problems. The virus kills as many as three of every four infected.

“The demise is the most painful," Kerala Health Minister Veena George said on Sunday in a Facebook post, referring to the death in the state’s Malappuram Pandikkad area.

“Expressing sorrow and pain to the family … It was yesterday morning that the child's sample was tested after Nipah was suspected.”

The victim had developed a fever 10 days before and was put on a ventilator at a private hospital.

His samples had been sent to the National Institute of Virology, Ms George said, adding that he was shifted to a government-run hospital in an “extremely critical condition”.

He died of a cardiac arrest.

Several parts of the coastal state have been earmarked as high-risk zones and the government has set up 25 committees to identify and isolate affected individuals as part of the Nipah virus control measures.

Named after the region in Malaysia where it was first identified 20 years ago, several outbreaks of the Nipah virus have been reported in Bangladesh and the coastal state has been the epicentre of such zoonotic diseases.

This is the fifth Nipah outbreak in Kerala. The first was in 2018, when 17 people died.

A year later, one person was infected with the virus in Ernakulam district.

In 2021, one person died in Kozhikode and two were killed by the virus in the same district in September last year.

Kerala was the first state in the country with a confirmed case of the coronavirus after a third-year medical student at Wuhan University fled the Chinese city at the peak of the outbreak in January 2020. It reported India's first case of monkeypox in 2022.