Disease associated with Nipah virus infection causes a devastating and often fatal spectrum of syndromes predominated by both respiratory and neurologic conditions. Additionally, neurologic sequelae may manifest months to years later after virus exposure or apparent recovery. In the two decades since this disease emerged, much work has been completed in an attempt to understand the pathogenesis and facilitate development of medical countermeasures. Here we provide detailed organ system-specific pathologic findings following exposure of four African green monkeys to 2.41×105 pfu of the Malaysian strain of Nipah virus. Our results further substantiate the African green monkey as a model of human Nipah virus disease, by demonstrating both the respiratory and neurologic components of disease. Additionally, we demonstrate that a chronic phase of disease exists in this model, that may provide an important opportunity to study the enigmatic late onset and relapse encephalitis as it is described in human disease.
Respiratory infections constitute the most widespread human infectious disease, and a substantial proportion of them are caused by unknown etiological agents. Reoviruses (respiratory enteric orphan viruses) were first isolated from humans in the early 1950s and so named because they were not associated with any known disease. Here, we report a previously unknown reovirus (named "Melaka virus") isolated from a 39-year-old male patient in Melaka, Malaysia, who was suffering from high fever and acute respiratory disease at the time of virus isolation. Two of his family members developed similar symptoms approximately 1 week later and had serological evidence of infection with the same virus. Epidemiological tracing revealed that the family was exposed to a bat in the house approximately 1 week before the onset of the father's clinical symptoms. Genome sequence analysis indicated a close genetic relationship between Melaka virus and Pulau virus, a reovirus isolated in 1999 from fruit bats in Tioman Island, Malaysia. Screening of sera collected from human volunteers on the island revealed that 14 of 109 (13%) were positive for both Pulau and Melaka viruses. This is the first report of an orthoreovirus in association with acute human respiratory diseases. Melaka virus is serologically not related to the different types of mammalian reoviruses that were known to infect humans asymptomatically. These data indicate that bat-borne reoviruses can be transmitted to and cause clinical diseases in humans.