With the State appearing to have seen off another wave of Nipah, veterinary epidemiologists have called for a systematic approach in tracing the cause of such bouts.
While the recurrence of the zoonotic disease in Kozhikode continues to baffle the scientific community, there are calls to identify hotspots of roost trees frequented by fruit bats to minimise anthropogenic activities in such areas.
Nandakumar S. Nair, Disease Investigation Officer, State Institute for Animal Diseases, who has been part of teams deployed to the affected areas to trace the sources of all four Nipah outbreaks reported in Kerala since 2018, emphasised the need to identify hotspots of bat roosts that harbour the Nipah virus (NiV). Fruit bats (or flying foxes that belong to the pteropus genus of megabats) are reservoirs of the virus.
