Nipah and hendra viruses encephalitis

Abstract

Nipah and Hendra viruses are two new zoonotic viruses that have emerged during the past decade (Murray et al., 1995b; Chua et al., 2000a). Both are members of the Paramyxoviridae family, and they share similar antigenic, serologic, as well as ultrastructural characteristics. Molecular studies have also shown that they are closely related in terms of their nucleotide and amino acid sequences (Harcourt et al., 2000). Because of their homology and the fact that these two viruses differ much more from other members of the Paramyxoviridae family, a new genus called Henipavirus (Hendra Nipah) was created for these two viruses (Wang et al., 2000, 2001; Bossart et al., 2002). Hendra virus first appeared in 1994 when it caused a disease affecting horses, which subsequently involved three human cases in Queensland, Australia. Between 1998 and 1999, Nipah virus resulted in widespread infection of pigs and humans in Malaysia and, to a lesser extent, Singapore (Murray et al., 1995a; Selvey et al., 1995; Chua et al., 1999). Between 2001 and 2004, several further outbreaks of Nipah virus have also occurred in Bangladesh (Hsu et al., 2004; ICCDR, B, 2004; Quddus et al., 2004; WHO, 2004).