- France confirmed on 22 October the first known human infection with Shamonda virus.
- The patient was severely immunocompromised, treated in Lyon, and died in early October.
- The health ministry says his brain complications were very likely linked to the virus.
- No risk to the general population has been identified. The WHO and the ECDC have been told.
- The virus only reached European cattle this summer and is now in at least a dozen countries.
A man has died in France after catching a virus that, until Thursday, nobody believed could infect people.
French health and agriculture ministries said on 22 October that the patient, who died in early October, was infected with Shamonda virus. It is the first documented human case anywhere. He had been treated in Lyon for a serious illness that left his immune system badly weakened. Officials haven't named him, but regional paper Le Progrès put him in his 60s and living in the Lyon area, according to CNN.
The ministries called it "an exceptional case." Their reading so far: the brain complications he developed before dying were very likely down to Shamonda. Whether the virus actually contributed to his death is still being looked at, the Irish Times reported.
How did he get it? Most likely a midge bite, officials say, somewhere in eastern France where the virus had been moving through animals. Nothing in current knowledge points to a risk for the wider population, the ministry added. Paris has notified the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
Shamonda was identified in Nigeria in the mid-1960s. A Simbu-group bunyavirus, it travels by Culicoides midges, the same biting flies behind Schmallenberg virus, and it mostly turns up in cattle, sheep, goats, horses and alpacas. Europe had never confirmed a case.
That changed in June. Vets in Doubs and Ain, in eastern France, started reporting dairy cows with fever, diarrhoea, lethargy and milk yields that had dropped hard. Schmallenberg tests were negative. Sequencing found something nobody had described before, a new Shamonda lineage, written up in Eurosurveillance on 20 August. In cattle the damage looked moderate, and the milk losses reversed.
Then it spread.
French farm groups now count 51 departments with the virus, and researchers have separated two strains: one in central France, another in the west around Brittany and Normandy. Outside France and Germany it has been found in farm animals in Austria, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland and Jersey. Portugal reported five cattle farms on 9 October. A sheep flock in the Oise tested positive, and so did brain tissue from four horses that died in Switzerland and the Hérault.
Plenty. Nobody has data on what Shamonda does to a human body, because until this week there was no human to study. There is no commercially available vaccine.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus offered condolences to the man's family and said the agency is working with the French to pin down how he was infected, what transmission routes exist and whether the public is at any risk. The WHO has also said more studies are needed just to understand how the virus spreads at all.
Outside experts were careful. Dr Ben Brennan, of the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, called it an important scientific finding and stressed there's no evidence of widespread human disease. He said further investigation is needed to understand the virus's ability to infect people. Another specialist quoted by the Irish Times found the news concerning, but pointed out that a single exceptional case doesn't automatically mean a significant threat.
The immune system matters here, and officials keep coming back to it. Their emphasis is on a severely immunocompromised patient who had been in an area where infected animals and midges overlapped. Whether a healthy person exposed the same way would get sick, or notice anything, is not something anyone can say yet.
Investigators haven't said whether they are checking for other human infections. For now the line from French authorities is unchanged: one patient, no identified risk to the public, work continuing with the WHO and the ECDC on how it happened.
