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When it started?
In 2018, infectious disease university experts found an unusual disease, the man was 56 years old, underwent a liver transplant, and abnormal liver function appeared without a clear reason.
According to a report by the American network “CNN”, the tests found that his immune system was in a reaction to hepatitis E, but they could not find the human strain of the hepatitis E virus (HEV) in his blood.
Hepatitis E is a liver disease that can also cause fever, jaundice, and an enlarged liver. The virus comes in four types, which are spread in different animals. At the time, only one of these four was known to infect humans.
Using tests of that HEV negative human strain, the researchers redesigned the diagnostic test, performed it again, and, for the first time in history, found viral hepatitis E that infects mice in humans.
“Suddenly, we have a virus that can jump from stray mice to humans,” said Dr. Siddharth Sridhar, a microbiologist and researcher at the University of Hong Kong who made the discovery. This was an unusual and unprecedented infection that the team asked if it was a “one-time accident. A patient was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” But it was repeated over and over.
Since that first study, 10 Hong Kong residents have shown positive results for the viral hepatitis E test, also known as HEV mice. The last case was a week ago. Sridhar said a 61-year-old man showed positive results on April 30 and that there may be hundreds of undiagnosed patients infected there.
The terrifying secret … How is it transmitted to a person?
The human strain of hepatitis E is generally transmitted through faecal contamination of drinking water, according to the World Health Organization.
But the rat strain poses a new mystery: No one knows exactly how these people are infected. In the two years after the discovery, researchers have not yet determined the exact pathway for transmission from rats to humans. They have theories: perhaps the patients drank contaminated water like the usual human race, or dealt with contaminated objects, but nothing was definitively proven.
The 61-year-old patient has a particularly puzzling dossier, there were no mice or rat droppings in his home, no one has seen symptoms in his family, and he has no recent travel history.
The Hong Kong Center for Health Protection said in a statement on April 30 that “according to available epidemiological information, the source and form of the infection could not be determined.” The man is still in the hospital and CHP investigations are ongoing.
The investigative team and city authorities have been trying to better understand this new health threat since 2018.
They have made some progress. Its diagnostic tests have been improved and improved. They have spread awareness among the health sector so that doctors know about the HEV mouse test, and have launched public awareness campaigns.
Scientists are testing groups of mice across the city in an attempt to determine the groups before the virus can jump into humans, which has provided data on the number of rodents in the city that carry HEV mice and the areas that have the largest number of mice.
But there are still many things that are still unknown. They do not know how long the virus incubation period lasts. They are still trying to find a cure, as the drug used to treat the human alternative to hepatitis E has had mixed results for patients with the HEV virus. Mice Of course, the biggest unknown still annoying is the method.
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