The outbreak of the Wuhan virus in
mainland China has sent health authorities across the scrambling to put precautionary measures in place
against the spread. The virus has claimed 25 lives, infected over 800
people and spread to a number of countries across the globe.
The Wuhan virus or the 2019-nCoV is part of a family of viruses known as coronaviruses.
These viruses primarily infect bats, pigs and small mammals but mutate easily and can jump from animals to
humans.
Chinese health officials as well as the World Health Organization (WHO) have confirmed that the virus can spread from human to human as well.
2019-nCoV has been found to be at least 70pc similar in genome sequence to SARS-CoV which affected numerous people and caused a number of deaths in 2003. Whether the Wuhan virus is of the same severity or lethality as SARS is still unclear.
Origins
The virus is thought to have originated in the seafood and meat market in Wuhan, a city in the central Chinese province of Hubei. The initial outbreak was identified in mid- December 2019 as a cluster of people with pneumonia with no clear cause.
On December 31, 2019, 27 people with pneumonia of unknown
cause were reported to the WHO. Most were stallholders from the
Huanan Seafood Market, seven of whom were in critical condition.
Meanwhile a 36-year old resident of Mumbai who had visited China recently, was quarantined at Mumbai’s Kasturba Gandhi Hospital on Sunday after he developed cold and fever, symptoms of the coronavirus. He is the fourth person
in Mumbai to be quarantined in the hospital’s isolation ward. Earlier
three people from different parts of Mumbai were quarantined at the same hospital.
In the meantime, BMC in Mumbai has formed an expert team consisting of epidemiologists, microbiologists, medicine, chest specialists who would be stationed at Kasturba hospital to deal with emergency or outbreak of coronavirus.
Health4u 