THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The horizontal line of transmission of Nipah virus , from one person to another along with varying periods of incubation have prompted the animal husbandry department (AHD) to probe multiple sources of infection.Pathologists and disease control specialists associated with AHD are sceptical about focusing on the theory of human beings contracting the disease from bats. The team had collected blood samples, tracheal and rectal swab of insectivorous bats from the well, and that of pigs from a piggery located within 10 km radius of the epicentre. The results of samples, being tested in National Institute of High Security Animal Diseases, Bhopal, are expected by Friday evening.“We can say that chances of transmission over long distances might be slim through pigs and cattle. It also applies for bats since the well was inhabited by insectivorous bats. Frugivorous bats are natural hosts of this virus,” an official associated with disease investigation in animals said. The officials said even if they go by the theory that the bats in the well might have caused the disease, there could also be a chance that the index patient (first patient) might have contracted the disease from another human being or through an animal.“A process of back-tracking is essential to find out the exact source. It is closely associated with various habits of the index patient like what he would have eaten, places he would have frequented, persons he would have closely mingled with and so on. We need to find out other possible chances of infection that happened before he would have ventured to clean an old well,” said another AHD official. The Nipah outbreak at Perambra also bears close semblance to the one that occurred at Belechuapara village in West Bengal’s Nadia district in 2007 that claimed five lives. It happened six years after an outbreak which claimed around 45 lives in Siliguri . The deaths at Belechuapara were intra-familial involving person to person transmission. A study conducted by the scientists of National Institute of Virology, Pune, Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine and Gautam Laboratories, says that the index patient was a 35-year-old male farmer addicted to palm sap liquor.The officials say that even if the deceased family members had been exposed to the virus during the same time, the period of incubation and deaths should also have been the same.“However, in this case, there has been a considerable gap between time of deaths of the members of the same family which indicates they would have been exposed over different periods of time. The virus is found to be so strong that it is active even after the formation of anti-bodies. So, persons being exposed to virus are more likely to fall ill within shorter period of incubation,’’ officials said.

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