TREND OF OCCURRENCE OF NIPAH VIRUS IN KERALA, INDIA: A FIVE-YEAR EPIDEMIOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION (2020-2024)

Between 2020 and 2024 the evening news of Kerala carried three short, anxious flashes about Nipah – a name that still makes mothers tighten their grip on a child’s hand at the fruit stall. We followed every telephone call the health teams made, every bat the foresters sampled, every tear-stained discharge slip from Kozhikode and Palakkad. In those five monsoon-washed years the virus found fourteen people; eight never went home. Each death arrived faster than the last diagnostic kit, yet each outbreak also arrived a little less lethal: case-fatality slid from 100 % to 57 %. The survivors were mostly the young – a ninth-grader who had only wanted a taste of fresh date-palm sap, a nurse who kept her mask on while suctioning an unconscious stranger. Phylogeny says the strain is now rooted here, not drifting in from distant forests; the trees, the bats and the crowded hospital corridors have become its neighbourhood. Numbers alone cannot describe the hush that falls over a ward when the RT-PCR machine starts beeping, but they tell us this: if we wait for the next index case to walk through the door before ordering monoclonals, we will lose again. The abstract ends with a plea – stock the antibodies, train the paediatricians, skirt the palm trees – so that the only thing Kerala has to fear tomorrow is the memory of yesterday’s grief.