Hantavirus

Monday

Chris Smith

How dangerous is the cruise ship hantavirus?

Virologists, the imaginative bunch that we are, often name new viruses after the places they were first found. Zika virus was initially described in Uganda’s Zika forest, while the Ebola river, flowing through what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, needs no explanation for the dread disease documented there. There are existing case reports of human outbreaks in South America stemming from gatherings and parties. That said, the documented efficiency of the transmission under these circumstances is extremely low Hantaviruses are chips off the same block.

Thursday

Matt Ridley

How dangerous is the cruise ship hantavirus outbreak?

Here we go again, or maybe not. The World Health Organization is reassuring us that the public health risk from hantavirus is low, after the outbreak on a cruise ship. Hantaviruses are a classic zoonosis: caught from animals. You have to inhale dust containing infected rodent droppings or – in the case of this Andean variant, which has shown limited human-to-human transmission before – to have close and prolonged contact with somebody who has already caught the virus. That means being coughed on, not just sharing the same air in a room. Zoonotic agents are often very good at killing people – Ebola, Marburg, Nipah, Hendra, SARS and Hanta have high fatality rates – but are not so good at infecting people Trouble is, of course, WHO said the same about Covid.

hantavirus