Indian media’s hassle over HMPV and actual concern, experts say ‘not new and no panic’

It was the first week of 2025 on Jan 6 when Indian media reported about the outbreak of new virus and by the evening all mainstream channels were filled with flashing the breaking news with the number of cases being reported across the country. By the mid night of the day, some reported total 6 and some said 7 cases of HMPV in the country.

Surprisingly, however, there was no emphasis on the virus and detection of cases in the report just a day after, with some formalities from health ministry guidelines to states.

The health ministry repeatedly underlined that this virus is not new and there is no need to panic.

Talking to medlarge, Dr Rajeev Jayadevan, Chairman, Research Cell, Kerala State IMA, said, “HMPV is not a new virus like Covid was in 2020. In the case of Covid, humanity had never encountered this virus or disease. Covid originated in China and spread rapidly to all parts of the world”.

Apparently, the Covid – Sars-CoV-2 – was a virus of unknown origin. No scientist had known about it before it appeared and therefore, it was termed a novel (or new) coronavirus. Also,

However, if we just type the name HMPV in google, we can have all details about the virus, which suggests that this is not a new virus. So far, there is no scientific evidence to claim that the HMPV has mutated to spread faster or more lethally this time. 

Dr Rajeev said “In the case of HMPV, for the past few days, there had been scary social media forwards, claiming that there was a new virus outbreak in China. Today, when the news broke about two babies in Bangalore being diagnosed with the HMPV virus, many people would have assumed that the virus that started in China has now arrived in India, just like what happened in 2020. However, this is not true. This virus has been around in multiple countries over the past several years, causing common cold in young children”.

Talking about the symptoms, he said most children do not fall ill. A few children with underlying asthma, get exacerbation. Very rarely, children get pneumonia. Adults also sometimes pick up the infection from children. No specific antiviral or vaccines are required at this time. Treatment is supportive, and symptomatic only. Those with complications such as worsening of asthma or pneumonia will require specialised treatment measures as deemed appropriate.

Moral: It is important to look at the quality of the information we read and share, and also to verify the sources where it came from. Much of the scary information about China has been created by random social media users, manipulated using false and scary narratives by some YouTube channels, which helped the news become viral.