7 dead and 60 people infected with SFTS virus in China
A new infectious disease caused by a tick-borne virus known as SFTS virus has taken life of seven people till date in China. While there are 60 more people infected in China, official media said in Beijing on Wednesday. The doctors are taking this situation sensitively because of their claims on human to human transmission of the new virus.
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More than 37 people contracted with SFTS virus in the first half of the year in east China’s Jiangsu province. Later, 23 people were found infected in Anhui province in eastern China, state-run Global Times cited media reports.
The report says that at least seven people have died in Anhui and eastern China’s Zhejiang province due to the virus. A woman from Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu, who was suffering from the virus, started having symptoms such as fever, cough. Doctors noticed a drop of leukocyte, blood platelets inside her body. She was later discharged from the hospital after a month of treatment.
SFTS virus is not a new virus. China isolated the pathogen of the virus in 2011, and it belongs to the Bunyavirus category of virus.
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Virologists believe that this infection must have passed through tickling humans and that the virus can spread among humans. Sheng Jifang, a doctor at the first affiliated hospital under Zheng University, said that the possibility of human-to-human transmission cannot be excluded. Patients can pass the virus to others through blood or mucus.
Doctors of China have warned that tick bites are the major transmission route of SFTS virus. There is no need to panic over infection with such viruses provided that people remain cautious.
