Associate Professor Sanjaya Senanayake, an infectious disease specialist at The Australian National University is urging China authorities to spill the beans on the severity of a “mystery” illness that’s spreading across China with covid-like alacrity.
Senanayake sees no immediate cause for alarm right now, but says more needs to be done to learn more about the relatively unknown virus human metapneumovirus (hMPV), the cause of overcrowded waiting rooms in China.
While hMPV typically produces cold-like symptoms like a blocked nose, headache, shivering and tiredness, Senanayake is calling for genomic data to confirm A) that hMPV really is the culprit, and B) there aren't any significant mutations of concern and C) to help develop a vaccine.
According to a recent report from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, cases of flu-like illnesses were on the rise everywhere across China, including influenza and hMPV.
While influenza accounts for 30.2% of flu-like cases in the outpatient and emergency rooms of China’s hospitals, hMPV cases are understood to comprise up 6.2% — ahead of other respiratory diseases such as coronavirus, RSV and adenovirus.
But unlike the COVID pandemic, which was completely new in humans and arose from a spillover from animals, hMPV virus was first discovered in humans in 2001 by a group of researchers in the Netherlands.
According to Professor Vasso Apostolopoulos, an immunologist at RMIT University, hMPV poses "substantial immunological concerns" for vulnerable populations including young children.
"Individuals with weakened immune systems, the very young or the elderly may have slower or less effective immune responses, increasing the risk of severe complications such as pneumonia, bronchiolitis or exacerbations of other respiratory conditions," said Apostolopoulos.
Here in Australia, hMPV is understood to circulate seasonally during late winter through spring. It is also a virus that can cause acute respiratory tract infections and has been implicated in a small number of outbreaks in residential aged care facilities in Australia and overseas.
In the last two weeks, hMPV has already infected over 1000 people in NSW and according to medical experts, these numbers are in line with epidemiological patterns witnessed in other parts of the world.