LONDON, Jan 30 (Reuters) – Airport screenings for Nipah virus, which have been stepped up across Asia this week after two cases were identified in India, \u200care more about reassurance than science, several leading experts said on Friday.<\/p>\n
Countries including Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Pakistan put in place temperature screenings at airports this week \u2060after India announced that two cases of the deadly Nipah virus had been found in West Bengal.<\/p>\n
The countries\u2019 health ministries described \u200cthe measures as precautionary steps for a dangerous disease.<\/p>\n
Nipah is an infection that spreads mainly through products contaminated by infected bats, such as fruit. It can be fatal in up to 75% of cases, but it does not spread easily between people.<\/p>\n
The WHO said on Friday that it did not currently recommend airport screening and the risk of the virus spreading from India was low.<\/p>\n
\u201cBased on what \u2060we currently know, there is a very low likelihood that this outbreak will cause a large \u200binternational epidemic,\u201d \u2060said Dr Md Zakiul Hassan, a Nipah specialist at icddr,b, a global health research institute in Bangladesh, where Nipah cases are reported almost every year.<\/p>\n
Piero Olliaro, professor of poverty-related disease at the University \u200cof Oxford, said airport screenings for such a rare disease were \u200clikely to be ineffective.<\/p>\n
\u201cCountries sometimes do \u200bthese things just to show them flexing \u200cthe muscles\u2026 telling their people that they’re doing something to protect them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Olliaro and other public health experts said airport temperature screenings rarely worked to stop the spread of disease. During COVID-19, for example, they missed the majority of cases, studies have shown.<\/p>\n
Also, many illnesses can \u200bcause a fever, and follow-up testing for a rare disease like Nipah is \u200btime-consuming, \u2060the experts added. Instead, the world\u2019s focus on Nipah would be better directed at better understanding the virus where it currently spreads, and protecting those \u200dat risk from it with new vaccines and treatments.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are people suffering from this disease, and they deserve attention,\u201d said Olliaro, adding that this would also help get ahead of any future pandemic risk, \u200cif the virus changes and becomes more of an international problem.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cPreparedness means we have the \u200btools now, and we are not trying to develop the tools when the horse has left the stable,\u201d he said. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Jennifer Rigby; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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LONDON, Jan 30 (Reuters) – Airport screenings for Nipah virus, which have been stepped up across Asia this week after two cases were identified in India, \u200care more about reassurance than science, several leading experts said on Friday. Countries including Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Pakistan put in place temperature screenings at airports this week \u2060after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_daextam_enable_autolinks":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14760\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}