The Nipah virus (NiV), spread by bats and can cause fatal encephalitis in people, has recently been identified in Malaysia, Bangladesh, Singapore, and India . It belongs to the order Mononegavirales, which contains other developing lethal zoonotic viruses, including Hendra, Marburg, and Ebola . The virus is thought to be stored naturally in the bodies of Pteropus fruit bats. Humans got NiV from pigs, the intermediate hosts of the virus, in 1998 during the first documented epidemic in the Malaysian town of Sungai . Since 2001, the intake of raw date palm sap contaminated with the saliva and excreta of the bats has been reported as the source of yearly NiV outbreaks in various districts of Bangladesh. The first epidemic in India was recorded in Siliguri, West Bengal, in 2001, and it was mainly spread by intimate personal contact or nosocomial transmission. In 2007, a second outbreak was reported in Nadia and West Bengal . In a recent NiV epidemic in the Kozhikode region of Kerala, a state in South India, the index patient was said to have been infected by fruit-eating bats . While nosocomial transmission accounted for the vast majority of cases, no clinical or statistical data was provided to confirm the frequency of the illness. The most recent epidemic in Kerala had a death rate of 91%, which is typical of all outbreaks .