The winter illness season in China is less serious compared to the previous year, according to data from its health authority. But the proliferation of a long-known but little-known pathogen called human metapneumovirus (HMPV) has caused alarm both at home and in other countries.
Cases of hMPV are constantly increasing and the pathogen has been identified as the main cause of respiratory disease and hospitalizations this winter, said the Chinese Center for Disease Management and Prevention. While not a new virus, hMPV also appears to be bothering governments across the region, with India, Malaysia and Hong Kong reporting cases in recent days.
Indonesia and Vietnam said they are closely monitoring the HMPV situation in China and asked the public not to panic.
The new attention on HMPV, just one of a number of germs that cause the common cold, is likely due to improved virus detection capabilities in China and other countries after the Covid pandemic, during which governments They spent millions on testing infrastructure and companies rushed to develop better virus detection kits. And five years after SARS-CoV-2 locked down the world, disease outbreaks in China are attracting enormous attention and often the subject of misleading posts on social media.
In 2023, cases of pneumonia in Chinese children led the World Health Organization to ask Beijing to share information on circulating respiratory pathogens.
HMPV, first discovered in the Netherlands in 2001, has become much easier to detect and is among a set of respiratory pathogens now detected by commonly used test kits.
Laboratory testing for pathogens, including hMPV, used to take a long time and results were often confirmed long after the patient had already recovered. “Current tests can identify the virus that causes infections within half an hour, so patients will discover it quickly and that will lead to more learning and attention,” Hu Yang, a doctor at Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital, told Nationwide Enterprise Day by day on last month.
Although HMPV can make people seriously ill, the current situation is “very different” to the Covid-19 pandemic, which was completely new to humans, said Professor Jill Carr, a virologist at the School of Medicine and Public Health. Flinders University.
Its symptoms are mild in most cases and include cough, fever, runny nose, and sore throat. There is no vaccine against the virus and it can cause pneumonia or even hospitalization in high-risk groups such as children, the elderly with chronic diseases, and patients receiving immunosuppressive treatments.
China will continue to see multiple pathogens fueling its winter disease outbreak into spring, the country’s CDC said last month.
