HMPV virus – latest: US monitoring China cases as Bali steps up checks on flights from the country

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are currently “monitoring” reports of increasing cases of human metapneumovirus in China’s northern provinces, according to reports.

“CDC is aware of reported increases of HMPV in China and is in regular contact with international partners and monitoring reports of increased disease,” a spokesperson for the CDC said.

“These reports are not currently a cause for concern in the U.S.,” the spokesperson added.

Amesh Adalja, an infectious-diseases physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told the Washington Post that Covid-19 distorted our perceptions of infectious-disease threats, especially when images of sick people emerge from China.

“There’s just this tendency post-Covid to treat every infectious-disease anything as an emergency when it’s not. You wouldn’t probably be calling me in 2018 about this.”

Experts say that human metapneumovirus (HMPV) behaves like RSV, with varying severity year to year, and there is nothing particularly worrying about HMPV.

Jill Carr, a virologist in the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University, Australia, said the situation is “very different to the Covid-19 pandemic”.

She told Politico: “The virus [Covid-19] was completely new in humans and arose from a spill-over from animals and spread to pandemic levels because there was no prior exposures or protective immunity in the community.”

A disease expert has urged China to share infection data amid an outbreak of human metapneumovirus (HMPV) which has spread across four countries.

Dr Sanjaya Senanayake, infectious disease expert associate professor of medicine at The Australian National University, said it was “vital” for China to share information in a “timely manner”.

“Also, we will need genomic data confirming that HMPV is the culprit, and that there aren’t any significant mutations of concern. Such genomic data will also guide vaccine development,” he told MailOnline.

HMPV (human metapneumovirus) spreads through direct contact with infected individuals or by touching contaminated surfaces, experts say.

Unlike viruses like flu, RSV, and Covid-19, there is no vaccine for HMPV, Dr Carla Garcia Carreno, director of infection prevention and control at Children’s Medical Center in Plano, Texas says. “We don’t have that advantage of priming or boosting our immune system to fight these viruses. But still, everything else that we learned for Covid can apply to metapneumovirus.”

She told CBS News: “If somebody’s sick, try to avoid crowding so they don’t expose everybody, especially the vulnerable people. If that person is sick and can not avoid going to a place where other people are, then try to use a mask, use cough and sneezing etiquette and good hand washing.”