Via his blog Random Analytics, Shane Granger offers a crash course on Hendra virus. Excerpt:
Recently I wrote and completed some analytics about the Ebola Haemorrhagic Fever (EHF) which lives in the rain forests of Africa. The natural host of that disease are the fruit bats of the Pteropodidae family.
Queensland is also host to a range of fruit bats. It has also become the host of a new and highly dangerous virus. Originally coined the equine morbillivirus it was later named the Hendra Virus (HeV) after the suburb which hosted the index cluster. It is closely related to another deadly variant, the Nipah virus which emerged from Malaysia in 1999.
HeV is a rare, emerging zoonotic virus (a virus transmitted to humans from animals), that can cause respiratory and neurological disease and death in people. It can also cause severe disease and death in animals, namely horses, resulting in considerable economic losses for horse breeders.
