Dr. William Schaffner

If humans get into that environment and stir up the dust and create an aerosol, they can breathe in the virus, and it can get down into their lungs.

It can also get on their hands, and then they can transmit it to themselves that way.

This is an infection that can have a long incubation period, days to weeks.

In other words, nothing happens and then all of a sudden you become sick.

The initial illness is rather mild.

You just think you have a viral infection with some fever and headache, not feeling too well, some muscular aches and pains.

That goes on for two or three days and then crash.

You get seriously ill because the virus has infected your lungs and your heart.

And that can result in death, as you have indicated.

Now, this virus...

who acquire it from the environment, and it is not usually transmissible from person to person.

However, there is a strain of this hantavirus called the Andes virus in South America that is transmissible from person to person, and that's the strain on the cruise ship.

So there's more concern because this hantavirus is more transmissible than usual.

Yeah, we don't know all the details of that, except it would appear to require close contact with more prolonged contact, usually indoors.

Of course, that's describing a cruise ship, right?

Where people have a lot of close contact for a prolonged period of time indoors.

That is expected to be the origin.

It's most likely that this group of ecologically and environmentally oriented passengers, it's that kind of a cruise, actually probably did some hiking and birding and the like before they got on board.

It is an old virus.

This is not a mutating virus.