The investigators took swabs from the wall of a hospital room in which one of the patients had been treated, five weeks earlier, and from the soiled frame of a bed in which that patient had lain. None of those surfaces had been cleaned in the meantime; bleach and labor were in short supply. Some swabs, both from the wall and the bed frame, tested positive for Nipah RNA. I’ll repeat that: Fragments (at least) of Nipah virus, left from what the patient had spewed out, were still present after five weeks, invisibly decorating the room. To the sanitarian, such spewing represents contamination. To
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