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. 2024 Mar 5:15:1342170.
doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2024.1342170. eCollection 2024.

Surveillance of Nipah virus in Pteropus medius of Kerala state, India, 2023

R Balasubramanian #  1 , Sreelekshmy Mohandas #  2 , Ullas P Thankappan  3 , Anita Shete  2 , Dilip Patil  4 , Kannan Sabarinath  2 , Basavaraj Mathapati  5 , Rima Sahay  2 , Deepak Patil  2 , Pragya D Yadav  2
Affiliations

Surveillance of Nipah virus in Pteropus medius of Kerala state, India, 2023

R Balasubramanian et al. Front Microbiol. .

Abstract

Introduction: Since 2018, the Indian state of Kerala has reported four Nipah virus (NiV) disease outbreaks, raising concerns about NiV spillover from bats to the human population. Considering this, a cross-sectional study was undertaken in the Pteropus medius bat population around the Nipah virus-affected regions of Kozhikode, Kerala, India, during February, July, and September 2023.

Methods: Throat swabs, rectal swabs, and organ samples were collected from bats to test for NiV using the real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), while serum samples were screened for anti-Nipah IgG antibodies through ELISA.

Results: An overall seroprevalence of 20.9% was observed in 272 P. medius bats tested. The throat and rectal swab samples of 321 bats were negative for NiV RNA. However, 4 of 44 P. medius bats tested positive for NiV in their liver/spleen samples. The partial N gene retrieved showed more than 99% similarity with the earlier reported NiV genome from Kerala state, India.

Discussion: The findings of the study caution that there is a spillover risk in the region and necessary precautions should be taken.

Keywords: India; Kerala; Nipah virus; Pteropus medius; seroprevalence.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
(A) The bat sampling sites in Kerala with details of the location of the roost (aerial distance from the Nipah virus index case house of 2023) and the number of bats sampled in February, July, and September of 2023. (B) The geographical map of Kerala with the Kozhikode (green) and Wayanad (light green) districts from which sample collection was performed is highlighted, and in the inset, the locations of Nipah virus outbreak reported areas (of the years 2018, 2019, and 2021 marked in red connected with black line showing the distance among each other) and the bat sampling roost locations (blue icon and red icon) with the aerial distance plotted from the 2023 Nipah virus outbreak location as blue lines (to roosts which were Nipah virus negative) and red lines (to roosts which showed Nipah viral RNA positivity). (C) The graphical representation of NiV RNA and antibody percent positivity estimated during the months of February, July, and September from the outbreak region in 2023.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The phylogenetic tree of the partial N gene sequences of 342 nucleotide length generated by the maximum-likelihood method using the TN + F model in IQTREE. The Nipah virus sequences retrieved (highlighted in red) from the P. medius from Kerala 2023 show clustering with the NiV-Indian genotype sequences.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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