Dr. Isabella Ekele

It's actually quite a rare virus, even in endemic countries.

So it's something that is known to occur frequently in South America, mainly in Argentina.

And it belongs to a very big virus family that are called hunter viruses.

And you find them mostly in rodents, but also in bats and in shrews.

And the particular thing about this strain is that it's among the very few hantaviruses that are apparently able to transmit from human to human.

Not very efficiently, but there are some reports that this is one of the more transmissible and also a bit more severe hantaviruses with quite can reach quite some high mortality in the reports that are there.

Sources in Argentina, they list two and one of them and the more frequently one is the Andes virus.

But among this very big family of hantaviruses, it's very rare.

So most of the hantaviruses we know, they don't transmit from human to human, but only from rodents to humans.

It's a very rare virus, so we don't have excessive data.

There are a few reports that apparently reported human-to-human transmission under certain circumstances, from a symptomatic patient to a very close contact to someone who works in a hospital, like a doctor or a nurse who's not aware of that infection.

infection and not wearing protective clothes while seeing that patient or in very close situations where people are in close contact and that was the scenario where this transmission was described but it's definitely not something that transmits very easily because otherwise we would see this more often and we would see larger outbreaks which do not happen so what is happening on this cruise ship i would still say still a bit unclear i mean there are different possibilities

It's not proven that it is really person to person transmission.

There are also other possibilities.

So it could be that all the people who are diagnosed now or who got sick, that they were all on land in Argentina and they were exposed to rodents urine or rodents excretia.

So that is the most common way how we transmit.

Another possibility would be that there is some kind of contamination on the vessel.

So let's say a surface or maybe even rodents on the boat.

We don't know.

We don't have any information on that.