[Both herpes B and the novel coronavirus are “the consequence of species jumps,” said Nikolaus Osterrieder, dean of the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences in Hong Kong. “But the important difference is that in the case from herpes B, it’s a dead end. It’s not jumping from one human to another human,” he added. “SARS-CoV-2, on the other hand, acquired the ability to spread to a new host.”]
By Rebecca Tan
According to the Chinese Center for
Disease Control and Prevention, the man worked in a research institute that
specialized in nonhuman primate breeding and dissected two dead monkeys in
March. He experienced nausea, vomiting and fever a month later, and died May
27. His blood and saliva samples were sent to the center in April, where
researchers found evidence of the Monkey B virus. Two of his close contacts, a
male doctor and a female nurse, tested negative for the virus, officials said.
The Monkey B virus, or herpes B
virus, is prevalent among macaque monkeys, but extremely rare — and often
deadly — when it spreads to humans. In humans, it tends to attack the central
nervous system and cause inflammation to the brain, leading to a loss of
consciousness, said Kentaro Iwata, an infectious-disease expert at Kobe
University in Tokyo. If untreated, there’s about an 80 percent fatality rate.
There have been fewer than a
hundred reported human infections of herpes B since the first case of
primate-to-human transmission in 1932, many of them in North America, where
scientists tend to be more aware of the disease, Iwata said. There are likely
to be cases of the virus that have gone undetected, but experts still widely
believe that it is an extremely rare condition among humans.
Victims have tended to be
veterinarians, scientists or researchers who work directly with primates and
could be exposed to their bodily fluids through scratches, bites or
dissections. In 1997, a primate researcher in New York died six weeks after a
caged monkey flung a drop of liquid at her face, hitting her eye. According to
the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there has only been one
documented case of an infected human spreading the virus to another person.
Both herpes B and the novel coronavirus are “the consequence of species jumps,”
said Nikolaus Osterrieder, dean of the Jockey Club College of Veterinary
Medicine and Life Sciences in Hong Kong. “But the important difference is that
in the case from herpes B, it’s a dead end. It’s not jumping from one human to
another human,” he added. “SARS-CoV-2, on the other hand, acquired the ability
to spread to a new host.”
Osterrieder said herpes B is very
well-adapted to macaque monkeys and unlikely to mutate in a way that it will
start to spread rapidly among humans. Nonetheless, both he and Iwata emphasized
that they hope more people learn about the disease and take the right safety
precautions, especially when interacting with monkeys in non-research settings,
such as at a zoo or in nature. Officials in Florida debated last year what to do over
a rapidly multiplying population of rhesus monkeys — an emerging tourist
attraction — many of which carried the herpes B virus.
Chinese health authorities said
discovery of the Monkey B virus in a human suggests that it might “pose a
potential zoonotic threat to occupational workers,” adding that it’s necessary
“to strengthen surveillance in laboratory macaques and occupational workers.”
By Monday, news of the veterinarian’s death had been viewed more than 110
million times on the Chinese social media platform Weibo.
“Apart from researchers, most
people should stay away from wild animals,” said one post with several thousand
likes. “You may want to be close to nature, but nature doesn’t want to be close
to you.”
Last week, Dallas County health
officials in Texas reported the case of a man with a rare case of monkeypox, which can also be transmitted
when people are bitten or scratched by an animal.
Pei Lin Wu in Taipei, Taiwan, and
Lyric Li in Seoul contributed to this report.
Read more:
Rare monkeypox virus reported in Dallas resident
People can’t agree on what to do about Florida’s
herpes-infected monkeys
