Europe’s public health authorities need to be aware of the first human case of Shamonda virus confirmed in France, but not “panic,” the ECDC told Euronews, as investigations into the patient’s death continue.
French authorities confirmed on Thursday a Shamonda virus infection in a patient in Lyon who died in early October, marking the first time the virus, previously seen only in animals, mainly cattle, has been reported in a human.
“This is a very special case,” Tamás Bakonyi, principal expert on vector-borne and zoonotic diseases and one health-related issues at the ECDC, told Euronews.
The affected patient had leukaemia and was “severely immunocompromised,” making it easier for the virus to infect the person. “The whole process of viral infections or other kinds of infections are behaving differently in those [immunocompromised] individuals than in healthy people,” Bakonyi said.
While it cannot be excluded that the virus can spread to other humans, “it does not mean that now we should be concerned, that we should be in panic,” he said, adding that there is limited evidence of a broader threat.
“The studies [in France] indicated that it was a quite long period that the patient had already been carrying the virus and then developed encephalitis and died,” Bakonyi said.
The Shamonda virus belongs to a group of viruses transmitted by biting insects called midges.
The virus was first detected in Nigeria in the mid-1960s and has since been reported sporadically in cattle in West, East and southern Africa and in Japan.
This summer it was also detected in Western Europe. Cases were reported in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland, as well as the island of Jersey.
Investigations are ongoing
Although it had never been reported in humans before, Bakonyi said that experts and public health institutes in European countries had already been looking into whether the virus can cause infections in humans.
“This is an alert, but we have seen this,” Bakonyi said, adding that millions of people have lived in an environment where the virus is present and it has never been reported as a problem.
“It cannot be excluded that it also propagates in other humans, so that is the alerting part and that is why now there are ongoing investigations to clarify every aspect,” he said.
Those include clinical, laboratory and epidemiological investigations to determine whether the virus caused or contributed to the patient’s death and how the infection was acquired.
Some of these studies include testing for antibodies in people who may have been exposed to the virus, such as veterinarians and farmers, to see if they have been infected even without developing symptoms.
The case underlines how closely animal and human health are linked. That’s why ECDC together with European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) are taking one health approach — working together in the fields of animal and human health they have begun gathering scientific data and other relevant information, including input from experts across different countries, to inform its risk assessment.