SOMETHING NASTY IN THE DISTANCE

Like many people I am fascinated by repulsive things: pineapple on pizza, drunken fratboys, exudates of several different kinds, tourists from the fly-overs, junk food, and diseases. You will often find us outside hospital emergency rooms, abattoirs, and restaurant garbage.
Or grammar schools, which are notorious hotbeds of loathsomeness.

Actually, if I really were so entranced by such stuff, I should eat salad more often and then gaze at my teeth in the mirror. And pineapple on pizza is sometimes splendid. Truly.

So let's not talk about the president and his confidants.


A few recent news articles have mentioned a disease in the tropics with an enormous fatality rate when it infects humanss. Which is mostly found among about half a dozen species of tropical fruitbats, though that might be an underestimate. Pigs are quite possibly also subject to it. A nurse in Bengal who caught the disease from a patient is still in a coma because of it.
There have been dozens of human deaths in three decades.

Nipah virus.

The primary host animal is the flying fox.
There is no vaccine yet.

Symptoms among humans are respiratory and encephalitic. Fatality is very likely. Recovery is often accompanied by neurological and personality changes, plus convulsive fits.

The most recent outbreak happened in West Bengal, this year.


While eating a late lunch I rolled what I had read about Nipah virus over in my mind. My meal was actually quite enjoyable, ma po tofu (麻婆豆腐 "pockmarked auntie soy bean curd") at a local chachanteng (茶餐廳 "tea dining hall"), with two hot beverages over which I dawdled.
Nipah virus is called 立百病毒 ('lap paak beng duk') or 尼帕病毒 ('nei paak ben duk').

So far no cases have been reported in China.
But it's on the radar.



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