Hacker News Reader

Comment by credit_guy | Hacker News Reader

One of these is for the little known Nipah virus. This virus is really scary. Like the Coronavirus, it jumps to humans from bats. Unlike the Coronavirus, it is extremely lethal. In the last outbreak, in 2018 [1], the case fatality rate was 89%. Fortunately, there were only 19 cases (17 died).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Nipah_virus_outbreak_in_K...

View on HN

Is my understanding correct that a virus so deadly would quickly peter out because it kills its hosts before it can spread?

That's my understanding as well. The problem, though, is that the virus doesn't completely peter out because it survives in the bats. There is a possibility a mutation makes the virus less lethal, in which case it could cause much more problems when it jumps again from bat to human. Maybe next year, maybe in a hundred years, maybe never.

Disclaimer: I'm absolutely no expert. The above is only my best guess.

It probably could also mutate in a way that it would be just as lethal, but with a longer incubation period.

Yeah. We all played that scenario on Plague!

The coronavirus alreay spreads before showing symptoms.

It also depends on how long it stays asymptomatic (so that a host can go around and infect other people before dying) and how well it spreads from host to host, and probably other factors that I don't know about

AIDS, for instance, also had an extremely high case fatality rate before modern treatment but due to it's slow progression it can spread just fine.

+1.

btw, maybe moderna can go after AIDS sometime later? I wonder how mRNA vaccines will work for AIDS patients...

If only there were some sort of... article you could read to find out about Moderna's vaccine plans :-P

"The development programs announced today are mRNA vaccine candidates against seasonal flu, HIV and the Nipah virus."

HIV is one of the three new programs in this announcement. So yes, that's precisely what they're hoping.

(Pedantry: HIV is the virus that causes the disease AIDS. The goal is to prevent AIDS by vaccinating against HIV. It's unlikely that the vaccine would be able to help patients who already have AIDS.)

damn I have a habit of only reading HN comments and guessing what the article is about

It is slightly odd that the headline doesn't feature HIV more prominently, since this is a press release. PR puffery would call for a headline more like "We cured COVID and now we're going to cure Flu and AIDS (and another thing you've never heard of)."

Props for modesty, I guess, but this is a weird instance to suddenly get coy.

The list of things they work working on is too long for a headline. I personally find HIV the least interesting (since I'm at extremely low risk by lifestyle - I'd still get the vaccine it work works, but it isn't a big deal to me). To me the correct headline is "moderna isn't working on vaccines for any of the cancers my family members are currently fighting" I have no doubt that someone else will read the article and respond "you idiot, they work working on X which is the most important things possible" - X of course being different for each personal situation.

HIV has effective prevention through both condom use and pre-exposure prophylactic treatment. The vaccine is a big deal in reducing costs, but, it's not as big a deal as the flu vaccine (or even as big as HPV was).

Bunch of reasons. The biggest (IMO) is that HIV is an STD. The next is that it is associated with the gay community.

Those two factors mean that it is nearly guaranteed to upset a bunch of religious nutjobs.

Heh, I do the same for sites that have overrly aggresive GDPR-wall. Headline and comments are usually enough.

It also matters how long it takes to kill - but yes. Assume it takes a month to a kill a person... that’s a lot of time to infect others, especially if say 10 days of that are asymptomatic.

Long incubation period with up to 6-21 days.

Yes. See also: ebola. If a disease is fatal too fast, it cannot spread well.

Also, Ebola spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids of an infected person, which has better mitigations than a lot of infections.

If bats are a natural biological reservoir then no. Because if the disease is less lethal in bats that's how it will maintain itself.

The 1910 Manchurian plague outbreak was spread pneumonically, with a nearly 100% mortality rate.

It spread pretty well. It doesn't kill you instantly, so you can walk around and spread it before you inevitably die.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchurian_plague

> One of these is for the little known Nipah virus.

I just submitted about this:

* https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210106-nipah-virus-how-...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25741798

I’d be a bit careful with those numbers. Who knows how many people really had it. Maybe a good number of cases showed no symptoms and thus were not detected?

They made a movie about it : Virus[1] on Amazon Prime.

Unfortunately due to flashbacks, which introduce non-linearity, it may be difficult for those who are not native speakers to follow through the movie. The problem is no obvious visual highlighting indicating that a scene was a flashback (like going black and white). Otherwise a really solid watch.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8941440/

I'd assume fowl to be much more common carriers but why are bats always the ones? Is there something glaring that I am missing?

bats have an unusual immune system:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/bats-immune-system-virus...

Bats get around (they can fly!) and they're mammals, so the viruses they carry are somewhat compatible with us. Not that birds aren't also virus spreaders (West Nile, etc.).

There's much more to it, of course.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/why-do-bats-have-so-m...

It seems we need to cull a lot of bats.

that actually makes transmission more likely. more culling means less comptition for food so more reproduction, which leads to a larger number of juvenile bats. Additionally, bats eat insects including mosquitos that cause maleria and they also pollinate fruit.

not really https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53856776

It happened so infrequently. How are they plan to test the vaccine on people?

The announcement states that only the other 2 vaccines will start Phase 1 trials in 2021, and is silent on Phase 1 trials on the Nipah vaccine. There's development work before that though: in vitro trials and trials on animal models. Depending on the outcomes, they can move to Phase 1 trials, where, just like they did for the Covid vaccine, they'll look at the safety (i.e. if there are side-effects) and the immune response (how many antibodies, and what type of T-cell and B-cell response there is). If they do that, they would be in a position to quickly proceed to Phase 2/3 trials in case there's an outbreak anywhere in the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com