Nipah virus was particularly scary. Nipah is a horrible pathogen, causing fever, brain swelling, and convulsions. Its fatality rate is as high as 75 percent. Of those who survive, one-third have neurological damage. It was initially isolated and identified in 1999 among pig farmers and people who had close contact with pigs in Malaysia and Singapore. Fruit bats hanging in the trees near a piggery dropped fruit infected with saliva, which the pigs ate. Nipah virus caused a relatively mild disease in pigs, but nearly three hundred human cases with more than a hundred deaths were reported. To
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