News

While Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) was implicated in six human clinical cases (including two deaths) from the Torres Strait islands and North Queensland in the 1990’s and ‘sentinel pigs’ were shown to have developed antibodies (an indication of prior infection, #20), the prevalence was such that no vaccination program was instituted and anything beyond routine surveillance was soon dropped. That’s not surprising, as there are always questions regarding the allocation of inevitably limited resources to rare threats.  Now, though, with the JEV suddenly appearing in human populations along the Murray Valley, the alarm bells are ringing and it seems likely that, with the related Murray Valley encephalitis (MVE) virus, JEV will be of continuing concern (#97).