A 56-year old man in Hong Kong has contracted the first human case of rat hepatitis E.
According to CNN, the patient developed the disease after a liver transplant in May 2017. He continued to show abnormal liver functions with no obvious cause.
Further tests revealed signs of an immune response to hepatitis E. Tests for the human form of the virus, however, came back negative. Genetic sequencing of the virus eventually revealed similarities with the rat form of the disease, which is known to occur only in animals.
“Previous laboratory experiments have found that rat hepatitis E virus cannot be transmitted to monkeys, and human hepatitis A virus cannot be transmitted to rats,” said Siddharth Sridhar, from the University of Hong Kong.
The man is fortunately cured after given antiviral treatment. Doctors also said that they can no longer detect the virus in clinical specimen.
Sridhar and his colleagues, however, wanted to know how the disease was able to cross over from rodents into human.
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