Emily Abdollah

And it gets opened up for the spring and summer camping season and

and humans are exposed to the droppings and the urine of the rodents and then come down with hantavirus.

And so the first thing that I really thought about is not knowing the timeline of the symptoms and how long folks had been on the ship.

You know, is the ship infested with rodents?

What species of virus is it?

Because only one has been shown to potentially cause transmission in humans.

So typically...

The rodent is infected.

It's not very much affected by this virus and it can carry the virus for a long time and get transmitted between the different rodents.

And they excrete hantavirus particles in their urine and their droppings and in their saliva.

So most cases are from humans getting exposed to

to the rodent droppings.

So they'll be sweeping up the rodent droppings and the virus particles get aerosolized.

More rarely, it can come from rodent bites, but it's often being exposed to the droppings that get aerosolized because they get dried out and then they can more easily spread in the air.

Yes.

If there are droppings in urine, you want to wear a mask when you're cleaning them and as much as you can, wet them down.

Because when they aren't dried, they have less potential to aerosolize or go into the air.

And we get this from inhaling the viral particles.

In fact, when we look at cases in the Americas, from what I understand—

A lot of the cases are in younger people of working age who are doing agricultural work.