[Daily Wire] A new report this week outlined an increasing virus problem in Hong Kong, which is attached to mainland China, where rat hepatitis E is jumping from rats to humans for the first time in history, and no one seems to know how it’s happening.
New animal based anomaly turns up where again? Hong Kong! Oh, I see. I see.
The first case was reported in 2018 when infectious disease experts at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) examined a man who had just undergone a liver transplant and was having liver problems.
"Tests found that his immune system was responding to hepatitis E — but they couldn’t actually find the human strain of the hepatitis E virus (HEV) in his blood," CNN reported. "With tests for that human strain of HEV negative, the researchers redesigned the diagnostic test, ran it again — and found, for the first time in history, rat hepatitis E in a human."
Dr. Siddharth Sridhar, a microbiologist at HKU, told CNN that "suddenly, we have a virus that can jump from street rats to humans" but added that it was not clear if it was just a "one-off incident."
Since the first discovery, ten more cases have been identified in Hong Kong with the most recently discovered case being identified a week ago in a man who had no recent travel history and had no signs of rats in his home. |