Running after rats All other animal species around the worst-hit areas will also be tested. The authorities have so far taken blood samples from rats, birds, goats, cattle and wild animals including bats. A national campaign to test all pig farms in other Malaysian states is scheduled to begin next week, he added. Health officials first mistook the disease for Japanese encephalitis. But the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention then detected the Nipah virus, a strain similar to the very rare Hendra virus discovered in Australia in 1994.
Symptoms are the same for both - high fever, aches, eventual coma and death.
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