Malaysian Chinese will welcome the new lunar year with joy this weekend. But for villagers of Bukit Pelanduk, there will be no joy. For them, Chinese New Year is a painful memory, especially for those who lost their loved ones to the dreadful Nipah virus last year.

It was during the previous Chinese New Year that Bukit Pelanduk received the bad news - a pig farmer in Sungai Nipah had succumbed to the so-called Japanese Encephalitis (JE) outbreak. The village, with 700 pig farms, was the largest pig-rearing community of its kind in Southeast Asia.

On learning of the death and being informed by health authorities that the virus was transmitted by mosquito, the 5,000 villagers began an intensive anti-JE operation, with fogging, mass vaccination drives and other safety measures including wearing long-sleeve shirts and long pants. Yet none of these efforts stopped the virus. One by one, the villagers began to suffer from fever, some collapsed and many sent to the hospital.

Between October 1998 and May 1999, Malaysian health authorities have recorded more than 258 cases of encephalitis, with at least 104 deaths. Most of deaths were first attributed to JE by the Ministry of Health, but it was later found to be caused by a new strain similar to the Hendra virus, named Nipah, after the village where the virus was first identified.

The rising death rate forced the villagers to abandon their homes for relative safety elsewhere. A year has passed and the nightmare has not gone away. If anything, it continues to haunt the victims of Nipah. Last Thursday, a pig farmer of Selangor's Batu Satu died of Nipah. The fatality once again highlighted the plight of the pig farmers and their families.

For about 200 people who had tested positive for the Nipah virus, news of the death was a bad omen. There is much confusion surrounding this disclosure, and the 200 are still unclear about the implications of testing positive.

"We are not sure whether we are carriers of the actual virus or simply its antibodies," said Lay Yong Tee, Chairperson of the Negeri Sembilan Nipah Virus Committee (NSNVC).

A medical lecturer from a university told malaysiakini that "there is no evidence yet to conclude or seclude whether they are carriers, but a positive reaction to the Nipah virus does not mean they are sick, it simply means that they have been infected."

It is unclear whether how many villagers in addition to the 200 are affected by the virus since most of them are too afraid to be tested.

According to a former pig catcher, Teong Mee Kok, his nephew Teong Seng Chuan, one of the Nipah virus antibody positive reactors, fainted few months ago and has been warded in hospital for two weeks.

Those tested positive for Nipah range from children to the elderly, said Lai Poh Chon, exco member of NSNVC. They are the "walking death", not knowing whether they are to live or die.

"They never get answers to the many questions they ask and are in the dark about whether they can marry or have children," Lai said, adding that the Ministry of Health's failure in delivering the true picture has caused great agony in many families.

Lai revealed that the health of those discharged from the hospital last year was getting worse. "At first they can walk and speak, but after a while they cannot walk properly and experience difficulty in talking," he said.

He criticised the hospital for doing nothing aside from collecting data on the patients. That does nothing to help the victims, he said.

"Most of the patients are middle-aged men. The authorities should be introducing highly skilled medical professionals to solve the problem or suggest treatment in foreign countries, instead of letting people wait in limbo," he said.

Lai also lamented that the Welfare Department had not offered any sort of assistance to patients and villagers.

"We have an authority which has failed to respond to the suffering of these people. I have given up on receiving any help from them," he said.