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Transcript:
Hey there! Today I’d like to talk about a little known disease that I think just doesn’t get enough attention: hantavirus.
Okay, obviously I’m joking. Thanks to our collective COVID-related PTSD, the entire world is now talking about hantavirus, and many people are concerned that we are hurtling towards another round of sheltering in place while Donald Trump talks about injecting bleach as a cure and millions of people die. So, let me start by saying that all the experts say that the risk of that happening is very low. Well, the bleach injection thing is higher, but the sheltering in place and dying part is low.
If you missed what’s been going on, first of all, drop your mental health routine in the comments so that I can try whatever it is you’re doing to avoid this kind of news. Second of all, what happened is that back in April, an elderly man fell ill with flu-like symptoms and died suddenly while on a cruise ship that had just left Argentina, and a few days later his wife also got sick and then died after disembarking at the next stop. A third passenger fell critically ill on the way to the next stop, and lab tests done in South Africa confirmed that the culprit was hantavirus.
Despite public calls for the ship to be blown up at sea with all remaining passengers aboard and never spoken of again, public health authorities tracked down everyone who had already disembarked to check them for symptoms and sent the ship to the Canary Islands to drop everyone else off and isolate them for awhile, leaving only a, um, “skeleton” crew remaining aboard the ship to get it back to its home base in the Netherlands. As of this recording, there have been a total of eight confirmed cases and three deaths, all passengers and crew on the ship, which means a case fatality ratio of 38%.
That sounds super scary, of course. In 2020, COVID ran rampant through the passengers of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and “only” killed 14 or so, or about 2% of them.
But this hantavirus strain’s much higher mortality rate is part of the reason it won’t likely be the next pandemic: unlike COVID, we have decent evidence to suggest that it only spreads once symptoms appear, and once those symptoms do appear, they’re so severe that the patient isn’t going to be getting on an airplane or singing in their church choir. Research on this hantavirus, known as the Andes virus because of where it’s usually found, suggests that while it IS the only strain that might spread from human to human (as opposed to rodent to human like the others), it requires really sustained contact to make that leap to other people. And when I say “sustained contact” I mean, like, fucking. In 2007, Chilean researchers tracked 76 patients with the Andes virus and 467 of the people those patients lived with. They found that only 1.2% of household members also got the virus, while 17.6% of sex partners got it. Sooooo yeah, it would take a lot of really disgusting orgies for this to become a pandemic.
Well, there is one other way: if it mutates. As we all know now thanks to COVID, every time a virus jumps from target to target, it can mutate, and those mutations could make it more or less deadly, or more or less contagious.
But once again, there’s good news: Andes virus has been known about for a long time, and unlike coronaviruses, it doesn’t tend to change much from case to case. And the other good news is that this did not happen in the US, so actual adults are in charge and working on it. We dropped out of the World Health Organization, but they are still there and on the case, coordinating the response and making sure that contact tracing is happening. Here in the US, the states where the passengers have ended up are handling it, which is good because this moron is in charge of the CDC right now.
So no, hantavirus is not likely to be our next global pandemic and you shouldn’t worry about it, depending upon where you live, of course. Here in the US, it’s rare but experts do think we may see more cases as climate change fucks things up in yet another weird way: most people get it by breathing in particles of mouse or rat poop, and there’s usually an increase in cases following heavy rains, because then more vegetation springs up, which supports more rodents looking for lunch, who then poop out more virus. To be safe, if you need to clean up rodent poop, you should wear a respirator, and a good rule is to cover it with a paper towel before spraying the towel with bleach, thus preventing the particles from floating up into the air.
I’ll end with a fun little fact that I recently learned thanks to this news. Humans have likely been describing hantavirus for centuries, and maybe even millennia. It came to the attention of the West in the 1950s because American soldiers started getting it while stationed in Korea. It was finally isolated to study scientifically in 1976 by a Korean epidemiologist named Ho Wang Lee, who had spent years on a project so dangerous that his own team kept falling ill.
Lee was then able to research the virus and develop diagnostic criteria to identify the disease in humans. Finally, in 1989, he developed a vaccine against the virus, making him the first person in the history of medicine to discover a disease, develop the diagnostic criteria for it, and then create the vaccine for it. Ho Wang Lee was hantavirus’s number one opp. He saw people dying and said “not on my fucking watch, you little bitch.” Or however that goes in Korean. I don’t speak Korean.
Anyway. Badass guy, Ho Wang Lee, and a good role model for how you should feel about hantavirus: be careful, be smart, but don’t be scared.
