ABSTRACT
Often it's not sophisticated statistical methods but investigative “shoe leather” and basic statistics that are required to figure out the cause of an outbreak. This chapter presents a story of such an outbreak. In September 1998 in the peninsular part of Malaysia near the city of Ipoh, a mysterious disease began showing up in local residents. Initial testing found antibodies from Japanese encephalitis (JE), which is usually not lethal to human. An outbreak that occurred slightly later in the village of Kampung Sungai Nipah exhibited much the same disease spread. The analysis of the sample, conducted partly in the United States, indicated that this was not JE, but rather a new viral infection. It was called Nipah virus encephalitis, after the village that contained the first confirmed case. Testing of the bats indicated that bats do carry the Nipah virus, but are not sickened by it, confirming that bats are indeed the reservoir host for Nipah.
