Four Human deaths from Rabies outbreak in Timor-Leste in May & June 2025.

Four Human deaths from Rabies have been confirmed in Timor-Leste (formerly East Timor) between 17 May and 17 June 2025, according to a bulletin issued by the World Health Orgnization on 24 July 2024. All four had been bitten by Dogs infected by the disease, and suffered syptoms including hydrophobia, photophobia, aggressiveness, convulsions, and hallucinations, and all four were subsequently confirmed as Rabies infections by Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction testing at the National Health Laboratory.

The first fatality was an adult male from Ermera Municipality, who was bitten by a Dog in March 2025, and sought medical help on 15 May, subsequently dying in a hospital two days later. The second fatality, another adult male, this time from Oecusse Municipality, who was bitten by a Dog in June 20242, and arrived at a regional hospital with symptoms on 27 May 2024, subsequently dying on 30 May. The third case was another adult male, this time from Bobonaro Municipality, who arrived at a medical centre on 12 June 2025, having been bitten by a Dog 2-3 months earlier. This parient subsequently died on 13 June. The final case was a female child from Bobonaro Municipality, who was taken into medical care on 12 June 2025, having been bitten by a Dog about two months earlier. This patient subsequently died on 17 June. Two further Rabies fatalities were reported in Oecusse Municipality in 2024.

The outbreak appears to have begun in Dogs in Oecusse Municipality in March 2024, since when 103 Dogs have died from the disease in Oecusse and Bobonaro Municipalities, as well as two Goats, one each in Oecusse and Bobonaro, and a Pig in Bobinaro. Oecusse Municipality forms an enclave within Indonesia's East Nusa Tenggara Province, where Rabies is considered to be endemic and Human fatalities are frequently reported, with Bobonaro shares a border with the province. Ermera Municipality lacks a border with Indonesia, but borders Bobonaro.

The island of Timor showing the regions covered by Timor-Leste and East Nusa Tenggara Province. Google Maps.

The rising number of Rabies deaths in Timor-Leste suggests the disease is spreading across the its borders with Indonesia, pobably via infected Dogs, and becoming established within the smaller nation. The World Health Organization recomends that this is addressed through a combination of Dog vaccinations and education to raise public awareness of the disease. 

Between March 2024 and 15 June 2025, 1445 dog scratches and bites were reported in Timor-Leste, 41% of which were considered to by Catagoy III exposures, which is to say exposures in which the skin is broken and saliva from an Animal has come into contact with this break. World Health Organization guidelines recomend that in such cases the wound should be washed immediately and the patient should be given  immediate vaccination and administration of rabies immunoglobulin/monoclonal antibodies. Of the 1445 known Catagory III exposures in Timor-Leste in 2024 and 2025, only 66% began this course of vaccination and antibody administration, and only 18% completed the course.

Rabies is caused by Viruses of the genus Lyssavirus, a member of the Rhabdoviridae Family of negative-sense single-stranded RNA Viruses, which also includes pathogens attacking Fish, Insects and Plants. Rabies is spread through the saliva of infected animals, and causes hydrophobia (fear of water),  anxiety, insomnia, confusion, agitation, abnormal behaviour, paranoia, terror, and hallucinations, followed by paralysis, coma and death in Humans. Many animals (notably Dogs) become extremely aggressive at this stage and will bite anything that comes near them, helping to spread the disease. 

Transmission electron microscope image with numerous rabies virions (small, dark grey, rodlike particles) and Negri bodies (the larger pathognomonic cellular inclusions of rabies infection). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/Wikimedia Commons.

In Humans, the disease typically has a gestation period of about three months, during which time the disease can be treated by repeated vaccination and doses of human rabies immunoglobulin, though if treatment is not begun within ten days of infection it is less likely to be successful, and once the patient starts to develop symptoms the disease is almost invariably fatal. Any wound thought to have been caused by an infected animal should be washed thoroughly under running water for at least five minutes, before being treated with alcohol or iodine, and immediate medical attention sought.

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Caprimulgus ritae: A new species of Nightjar from Timor and Wetar.

The Wallacean bioregion lies between the Asian and Australian continents, and has been recognised as significant for our understanding of evolution and biogeography since the nineteenth century. The islands of Wallacea are separated from the Asian and Australian landmasses by areas of deep water, and have never been connected to either area by a land-bridge, which means that every Animal and Plant there is descended from individuals that managed to cross by sea or air, leading to a huge number of endemic species (species not found anywhere else). Despite this significance, many groups of organisms are relatively understudied in Wallacea, and new species are still discovered there on a regular basis.

Nightjars are nocturnal Birds with highly cryptic plumage, seldom observed by Humans despite a near-global distribution. Their highly unobtrusive nature, combined with the similar appearance of different species of Nightjar makes them extremely hard to study, although in recent years, some progress has been made on differentiating Nightjar species by their songs, aided by the fact that Nightjars will respond to the recorded calls of members of their own species, but not those of other species.

The islands of Timur and Wetar, in the Lesser Sunda Islands, are known to be home to a form of Long-tailed Nightjar (Caprimulgus sp.), which is small in size, leading to the suggestion that it might be a population of Caprimulgus manillensis, otherwise known from the Philippines, Caprimulgus celebensis, otherwise known from Sulawesi, or Caprimulgus macrurus, which is distributed from Pakistan to Australia, and generally accepted to be a species complex rather than a single species.

In a paper published in the journal Ibis on 24 June 2024, the late Ben King of the Department of Ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History, George Sangster of the Department of Bioinformatics and Genetics at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, and the Naturalis Biodiversity Centre, Colin Trainor of the College of Engineering, IT and Environment at Charles Darwin University, Martin Irestedt, also of the Department of Bioinformatics and Genetics at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Dewi Prawiradlilaga of the Museum Zoologicum Bogoriense at the Cibinong Science Centre, and Per Ericson, again of the Department of Bioinformatics and Genetics at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, formally describe the Nightjars found on Timor and Wetar islands as a new species.

King et al. compared recordings of Nightjars from Timor and Wetar to recordings of Nightjars from other areas, finding that these calls were quire distinct. They then compiled a genetic phylogeny for the genus Caprimulgus including two museum specimens collected from Timor and Wetar, again recovering these as a separate species, most closely related to Mees's Nightjar, Caprimulgus meesi, which is found on Flores and Sumba islands, but separated from this by a mean sequence divergence of 5.8%, considered sufficient to differentiate species (the mean sequence divergence between Humans and Chimpanzees is only 1.23%).

The new species is named Caprimulgus ritae in honour of Rita Bobbin, a long-term friend of Ben King. It is described on the basis of four museum specimens in the collections of the American Museum of Natural History and the Naturalis Biodiversity Centre.

Male Caprimulgus ritae, Wetar, 13 October 2014. James Eaton in King et al. (2024). 

Caprimulgus ritae is brownish in colour with a white and cinnamon speckled pattern and a distinct white bar on its tail. It is found only on the islands of Timor and Wetar. It is a forest specialist, although it appears to be quite flexible about the forests it will live in, having been recorded in a range of environments from tall evergreen forest to highly deciduous dry forest. It generally appears to favour lowlands, but has been recorded as high as 1500 m above sealevel. 

The island of Wetar still retains more than 95% of its original vegetation cover, including extensive areas of forest, while both West Timor and Timor-Leste have extensive forest reserves, which appear to form primary habitats for the Nightjar, which King et al. estimate to have a population probably numbered in the hundreds or thousands.

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Magnitude 7.3 Earthquake to the northeat of Timor Leste (East Timor).

The United States Geological Survey recorded a Magnitude 7.3 Earthquake at a depth of 166.9 km beneath the Banda Sea, roughly 121 km to the northeast of Timor Leste (formerly East Timor), at about 3.25 am local time on Thursday 30 December 2021 (about 9.25 pm on Wednesday 29 December GMT). Quakes at this depth are seldom dangerous, but are often felt over a wide area, and this one was felt across the island of Timor and in the Northern Territory of Australia in the area around Darwin.

 

The approximate location of the 30 December 2021 Banda Sea Earthquake (USGS).

The Banda Sea is underlain by two tectonic plates, the Banda Sea Plate and the Timor Plate; two small plates caught between the colliding Eurasian, Pacific and Australian Plates. The Timor Plate is being subducted beneath the Banda Sea Plate. As it sinks into the Earth the subducting plate is being melted by the heat of the planets interior; some of the melted material then rises through the overlying Banda Sea Plate, fuelling volcanism on a number of islands in the region. This is not a smooth process, and the plates frequently stick together then break apart as the pressure builds up, leading to Earthquakes in the region.

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