The alarm bells are ringing again. Indian authorities in West Bengal are racing to contain a Nipah cluster that has already reached healthcare workers, while roughly a hundred contacts have been placed under quarantine.
Nipah is not Covid-19, and pretending otherwise is part of the problem. The virus does not spread with the same ease through casual, everyday proximity. Outbreaks are typically sparked by a zoonotic jump – most often from fruit bats, sometimes via intermediary animals or contaminated food – and then amplified through close contact, including in caregiving settings when infection control measures falter. Yet what makes Nipah frightening is not its reach but its consequences. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates a case-fatality range of 40% to 75%, and there is no licensed vaccine or specific cure. Social media in China, India and beyond is awash with anxiety after calls to close travel lanes to India. Fear easily morphs into stigma. In past outbreaks (Ebola, SARS, even AIDS), innocent people were shunned. Here too, any patient or community could be stigmatised by rumour. The more serious question is whether governments have kept the unglamorous machinery of preparedness functioning after the trauma of Covid. Across the region, surveillance capacity surged in 2020 and then, with budgets tightening and political attention shifting, began to thin. This is where the West Bengal outbreak becomes a mirror for Pakistan. Our direct travel links with India may be limited, yet viruses do not respect diplomatic frost. Movement occurs via third countries, through land crossings where they exist, and through the dense mobility of a region that shares ecosystems as well as markets. A practical preparedness agenda begins with strengthening the basics: early surveillance of unusual clusters of acute respiratory illness and encephalitis, rigorous infection prevention and control in hospitals, and a clear, pre-written risk-communication plan.
There is also a wider lesson that South Asia keeps postponing. Outbreaks like Nipah are a “One Health” problem, sitting at the intersection of human health, animal health, and environmental disruption.
The international environment is, meanwhile, moving in the wrong direction. At precisely the moment when surveillance and coordination should be strengthened, global health cooperation is being politicised and defunded. The WHO has warned that the United States’ withdrawal makes both the US and the world “less safe.” Europe, too, is signalling retreat through budget cuts that weaken shared early-warning capacity. The coming month adds urgency as the ICC World Cup begins on February 7, 2026, drawing large cross-border crowds and a heavy travel load. This is not an argument for spectacle to stop, but an argument for competence to rise. Mass events are stress tests of surveillance and health-system readiness, exposing fragilities long ignored.
Pakistan does not need to panic. It does, however, need to prepare. The right time to rebuild surveillance, protect health workers and treat infection control as non-negotiable was in the immediate aftermath of Covid. The second-best time is now.
