These patterns support previous calls for increasing targeted global surveillance and pathogen discovery in atypical disease outbreaks [44, 45] . As the Malaysian NiV outbreak highlights, surveillance of livestock and livestock workers in regions of high wildlife biodiversity would improve the chances that viral chatter of wildlife origin is detected prior to a widespread epidemic in livestock or people. This approach may be critical for identifying new outbreaks of NiV, which has recently demonstrated a potential to produce propagated outbreaks in Bangladesh, where short chains of human-to-human transmission have occurred [34] . It may also provide a strategy for the identification of unknown henipaviruses, and other novel agents, prior to epidemic or pandemic emergence. 