You’ve probably seen “deadly Nipah virus” splashed across headlines, usually next to a photo of someone in a hazmat suit. Nipah is a serious virus — but it’s also very different to COVID-19, and the actual risk to people in Australia is extremely low.
This piece is here to gently separate fact from panic: a clear explainer on what Nipah is, how it spreads, and how worried Australians should realistically be.
What exactly is the Nipah virus?
Nipah is a zoonotic virus, meaning it usually lives in animals and only occasionally jumps into humans. Professor Michelle Power, a Macquarie University expert in zoonotic diseases, told PEDESTRIAN.TV that “the most known kind of transmission pathway is from bats, but it’s also transmissible from pigs in some countries to people” when those animals become infected and pass the virus on.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) says Nipah was first identified in 1998 during an outbreak among pig farmers in Malaysia, and has since caused outbreaks in Bangladesh, India, the Philippines and Singapore. In those outbreaks, the estimated case fatality rate has generally sat somewhere between 40 and 75 per cent, depending on the setting and the care people receive. That high fatality rate explains the alarm — but the way the virus spreads explains why it hasn’t turned into a global pandemic.
What are the symptoms of the Nipah virus?
WHO says symptoms usually begin three to 14 days after infection and can range from very mild to extremely severe. Early on, most people develop a fever plus signs something is off in the brain or lungs — things like headache, confusion, difficulty breathing or a cough, along with chills, fatigue, drowsiness, dizziness, vomiting or diarrhoea.
In more serious cases, Nipah can lead to encephalitis, which is swelling of the brain, and that’s when people may experience seizures, disorientation, drowsiness.
Nipah is in the same henipavirus family as Hendra virus, which appears in Australian horses from time to time, but there’s an important difference: the strain now causing concern in India is not circulating in Australian animals.
How does the Nipah virus spread, and how is it different to COVID-19?
The way Nipah moves between hosts is quite specific. Power says there are three broad ways it can be transmitted, but one dominates. Typical transmission happens either through direct contact with bats — with their saliva, blood or faeces — or when those bat products contaminate food and the person ingests the food and the virus.
Person‑to‑person spread is possible, but much harder than many headlines suggest. Power notes that in “very rare cases, it can be transmitted from person to person”, and even then it requires “really close contact” with an infected person’s saliva, blood, urine or faeces. In practice, she says, that means transmission is usually seen “in a medical situation” — such as a health worker caring for a very sick patient — or in a close household where someone is directly handling those fluids.
Nipah is undeniably dangerous for people who develop severe disease. However, it doesn’t have the easy airborne spread that allowed COVID to race around the world.
Power notes that those viruses “have respiratory transmission pathways, so through a sneeze or coughing, and then the virus particles are carried in those droplets, so airborne transmission”. By contrast, Power says the Nipah virus is not airborne and “you have to have that direct contact with either the faeces or urine or saliva from a bat or from an infected person in those rare instances”.
What’s happening in India, and how is Australia responding?
The current concern comes from India’s state of West Bengal, where two Nipah cases have been confirmed and nearly 200 close contacts have been monitored and tested. Indian health officials say 196 contacts have returned negative tests and have shown no symptoms, while neighbouring countries have beefed up screening and testing for travellers arriving from India.
In Australia, Health Minister Mark Butler has tried to acknowledge the seriousness of the virus without fuelling panic. Speaking about the situation, he said “the Nipah virus is very rare, but it’s also very deadly”, and confirmed that Indian authorities had told Australia “they’ve got that outbreak under control”. At the same time, he stressed that “we’re monitoring it very, very closely because this is a very serious virus”.
“We don’t have any advice at the moment to change our existing protocols for sick travellers who arrive in Australia. There already are protocols for that, but we’ll continue to watch the situation closely,” Butler told ABC’s Radio National last week.
How worried should Australians actually be about the Nipah virus?
If you’re in Australia and haven’t just come back from a region with active cases, the risk is extremely low. Power is blunt about that. “We don’t have Nipah virus in Australia,” she says. “We don’t have the strain or the type of virus that’s caused the cases over in India at the moment. So it’s not present in any of our animals, our bats, and so there’s no chance that we would detect a case here.”
When she talks about risk, she’s really talking about travel. “The highest risk, I guess, for someone who is in Australia is if they have gone to that area where the Nipah virus cases are currently occurring and have come in contact with either bat urine in those areas or a case,” she explains.
Even then, she describes it as a low‑probability scenario: “For Australia, there’s no risk from acquisition of Nipah in the country, but someone who might have travelled to those high‑risk areas [is] at risk, but again, a low risk.”
Her key takeaway is simple: “There’s no risk for people who are in Australia of contracting Nipah virus that we’re seeing overseas. But if you do travel to high‑risk areas, just to be aware that there are risks from lots of different agents.”
The social backlash Asian communities are worried about
Even if the health risk here is low, Asian Australian advocates are worried about a different kind of fallout: racism and stigma.
Erin Wen Ai Chew from the Asian Australian Alliance says that among people in her networks, there’s already concern about how Nipah is being framed. She told PEDESTRIAN.TV that some are worried about “the racial backlash, particularly to people of Indian and South Asian backgrounds”, especially off the back of recent anti‑immigration marches that targeted those communities. In their view, talk about “the 2026 Nipah virus” being something that has “all come from India” risks feeding into that same anger.
Chew also points to the way old stereotypes get recycled.
“It does place that negative narrative that people of Indian backgrounds are dirty, or India is dirty, and all that can compound into a lot more hate and racism. People of South Asian background are [generally] brown-skinned. So there’s also the skin colour biases that people of a darker skin are dirty, that unfortunately is a narrative that exists in our society,” she explains.
The visuals matter too. Chew says that when she watches Asian news outlets like CNA, “they actually kind of say that the transferability rate of the Nipah virus is very low, and it can be easily contained”. She contrasts that with some Australian coverage, saying, “I’ve seen online, particularly coverage by Channel 7, for example, where they put this big picture of people wearing those big gas masks, and it can actually remind and link people back to the days of COVID, where people were wearing big gas masks and that was a huge pandemic”.
She worries those choices do more than just set a mood. “It can also remind people of the hatred that they may have, or the resentment that they held due to ignorant views and false media narratives that first of all, COVID was an Asian thing, and now they may see Nipah virus as an Asian thing because it has been spreading in Asia,” she says.
“I’ve seen a lot of headlines that kind of say, ‘Well, Australia is next, Australia is under threat of the Nipah virus,’ so all these alarmist and sensationalist kind of headlines is no different from the COVID headlines right at the start where they told people to call things the China virus, Chinese kids stay home. It’s like a repeat of these very racially charged sensationalist type of headlines and images.”
Chew wants media and government to handle this outbreak differently: change the images, dial down sensationalist headlines, foreground the low transmission and the fact this is not another COVID, and think about how coverage lands on the people it describes.
And what about the bats?
Whenever a virus story mentions bats, they also tend to become villains. Power really wants people to resist that reflex, especially here.
“We have lots of bats in Australia and I always like to give bats a plug,” she says. They’re “an extremely important species for pollination” and “part of our ecosystem”, and she points out they’ve “had a tough time at the moment with the heat stress events from the high temperatures in Victoria”. At the same time, she’s realistic that bats can carry infections, which is why she doesn’t want people getting up close.
She stresses that Nipah “is not in our bats here” and that “bats are our friends, even though sometimes they do have these nasties that are transmissible to us”.
The bottom line
Taken together, the picture that emerges is this: Nipah is a deadly virus for those who get severely ill, and the small cluster in India deserves serious attention. But it spreads in very specific ways, is not airborne like COVID, has never been detected in Australian animals or people, and is very unlikely to affect day‑to‑day life here.
The job for most Australians is to stay informed, especially if you’re travelling, and to be thoughtful about how we talk about the outbreak — because the way we tell the story can either help people understand the real risk, or make life harder for the Indian and broader Asian communities who have already carried more than their share of pandemic‑era blame.
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