New virus detected in China infects 35 people: What to know - Fox News

At least 35 people have been infected by Langya henipavirus (LayV) in China’s Shandong and Henan provinces in the northeast, according to Taiwan's Centers for Disease Control.

The health agency cited a recent study from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), which is titled "A Zoonotic Henipavirus in Febrile Patients in China.".

Twenty-six of the 35 patients were said to be infected with LayV only, meaning there were no other pathogens present.

The infected LayV patients reportedly had a "recent history of animal exposure in eastern China," according to the study’s summary.

The genome of LayV is reportedly composed of 18,402 nucleotides, and it has an identical genome organization to other henipaviruses in the Paramyxoviridae family – also known as a family of single-stranded RNA viruses.

So far, there hasn’t been human-to-human transmission of LayV and the patients weren’t in close contact

"Contact tracing of 9 patients with 15 close-contact family members revealed no close-contact LayV transmission, but our sample size was too small to determine the status of human-to-human transmission for LayV."

The study noted that further assessments need to be conducted to see if LayV could have a cross-reaction with the Mojiang virus, which is another henipavirus that can cause lethal pneumonia