Nipah encephalitis claimed another life and this time on the first day of the Chinese New Year.

On the morning of Feb 5, while Chang Shung Chu, a housewife at Tanah Merah A Village, Port Dickson was busy with festive celebrations, she received a call from Kuala Lumpur University Hospital informing her to immediately go to the hospital.

On arrival she was told that her husband, Cheng Hua Shin, 34, who suffered from the Nipah encephalitis infection and was hospitalised on April 8 last year, passed away earlier that day. He left behind three children aged four to 10.

Last month, a pig farmer from Batu Satu, Selangor, was reported to have died of Nipah encephalitis on Jan 27.

The recent fatalities once again highlighted the lingering fears of the pig farmers and their families. For about 200 people who had tested positive for the Nipah virus, news of the deaths was a bad omen.

There is much confusion surrounding this latest news of another casualty, and the 200 are still unclear about the implications of having been tested "positive".

Meanwhile, chief of Neurology Department of University Malaya Professor C. T. Tan told malaysiakini that only 5 per cent of the patients suffered a recurrence of the problem.

"Most of the patients will recover," he said.

However, Tan said that most of them need not to worry about their health because the "positive" test readings only indicated the presence of Nipah encephalitis antibody.

He advised those who worried about their health to come to the hospital regularly for follow up clinics. "But only some of them would come, others don't turn up," he lamented.

Between October 1998 and May 1999, Malaysian health authorities have recorded more than 258 cases of encephalitis, with at least 104 deaths. Thousands of pigs were shot dead in the bid to control the deadly outbreak.

Most of the deaths were first attributed to Japanese encephalitis (JE) by the Ministry of Health, but it was later found to be caused by a new strain similar to the Hendra virus, later named Nipah after the village where the virus was first identified.