A tick virus infected 10.4% of 3,163 patients, and seven died when it came with another

Of 3,163 patients who arrived at Chinese hospitals with fever and a history of tick exposure, 10.4% carried a virus nobody had named a few years earlier. Among 38 of them who were also infected with the better-known Dabie bandavirus, seven died. Researchers at the State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity in Beijing reported the findings in the New England Journal of Medicine, where the paper was published on 2 September 2026, and coverage of it circulated through late September.

The newcomer is the Asian longhorned tick nairovirus, abbreviated ALTNV. It surfaced because a stubborn share of patients with a tick-borne illness were testing negative for everything on the diagnostic list, and Chinese clinicians had been tracking such unexplained cases since 2009.

The 3,163-patient screen and the 10.4% figure

The work, cited as New England Journal of Medicine 2026;395(9):929, was led by Xiao-Ai Zhang and colleagues and came out of the hunt for severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome, or SFTS, a disease caused by Dabie bandavirus (DBV). Zhang and colleagues found that roughly 30% of patients with an SFTS-like picture had no detectable DBV, and that gap led the team to look for another agent, as Report.az relayed. The denominator is the 3,163 patients, all with tick exposure and fever, drawn from sentinel hospitals in regions where tick-borne viruses circulate. AABB’s news item on the study says ALTNV RNA or IgM antibodies appeared in 10.4% of them, and in 15.1% of the DBV-negative subset.

The patients are not a random sample of the population. They were people sick enough to present at hospital and tested because ticks were suspected, so 10.4% describes positivity in that group and not infection in China at large. The study’s design, a screen of febrile patients linked to tick exposure, also means that people with mild or no symptoms are absent from the denominator, and that any estimate of how common the virus is in the general population would need a different kind of survey.

Coinfection with Dabie bandavirus and the seven deaths

Thirty-eight patients had both viruses at once. The Beijing researchers report, as carried by ScienceDaily, that seven of the 38 coinfected patients died, a case-fatality figure of 18.4%. The deaths sit entirely inside that subgroup. They are not seven out of the 3,163, and not seven out of every patient who tested positive for ALTNV.

Compared with patients who had DBV alone, the coinfected group more often had respiratory symptoms, 61% against 38%, and kidney impairment, 84% against 66%, according to AABB. The Beijing team notes that DBV itself is a severe disease, with a case-fatality rate of 10 to 30%, and that is the central caution. A death among coinfected patients cannot be assigned to ALTNV, to DBV or to the combination without a design built to separate them, and the report does not claim to do that.

Patients with ALTNV alone fared far better. Among 56 monoinfected patients the common symptoms were fatigue in 84%, gastrointestinal problems in 80%, low platelet counts in 38% and elevated liver enzymes in 36%, and the AABB account quotes the paper that all recovered without sequelae. Report.az adds that no confirmed deaths have been attributed to ALTNV alone, which fits the pattern but rests on small numbers.

Haemaphysalis longicornis across 15 provinces

The vector is the Asian longhorned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis. The team found ALTNV in 1.29% of 47,428 ticks collected across 15 Chinese provinces, with the highest rate, 1.75%, in H. longicornis. The same tick carries DBV, so the two viruses share territory and a carrier, and the paper’s authors wrote that this cocirculation points to a need for better differential diagnosis between the infections.

For readers outside East Asia, the reported scope is narrow, and nothing in the study describes a case outside China. AABB states that ALTNV has not been reported in the United States, and the data collected in this study come from China. Newsweek’s coverage adds that the tick species does have established populations in parts of the United States, but that the virus has not been detected in American ticks.

Tyler Evans, quoted there, said clinicians had thousands of patients with classic tick-borne symptoms who tested negative for every virus then known, a description that matches the roughly 30% of SFTS-like cases in which no DBV could be found. Sharon Nachman of Stony Brook Children’s Hospital told Fox that ticks carry many viruses and that identification is improving. What the paper leaves unresolved is the deaths: seven of 38 is a small count, and the Beijing group’s report does not settle how much of that mortality ALTNV adds.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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