Nipah virus terror is over, no new cases

Thiruvananthapuram: State Health Minister Veena George said the fear of Nipah virus is ending in Kozhikode. He said that the test report of the last of the four patients has come negative twice, which reduces the risk. The Nipah virus patients discharged included a nine-year-old boy, whose father died of the virus last month.

Medical officials suspected the spread of Nipah after the death of two patients in Kozhikode during the second week of September. Following this, several areas where the suspected outbreak spread were turned into a containment zone and all educational institutions in the district went into online mode for about a week. Two deaths and six positive cases of Nipah were reported in Kozhikode. Meanwhile, officials at the National Institute of Virology, Pune, are continuing their testing on samples collected from bats as they are yet to identify the cause of this latest outbreak.