Emily Abdollah

So in addition to contact tracing, the epidemiologists on the ground are figuring out when did people arrive in South America?

Where were they before?

Where did they travel?

Where did they stay?

Where were they situated on the ship?

So

I think, you know, it's a very nosy job, but it's a very important job because you need to ask people all kinds of questions to figure out what is more common in the people who ended up developing infection.

So hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, HPS, that's predominantly in the Americas.

And it's named to really let us know that it is predominantly impacting when it becomes severe, the lungs and the heart.

It starts out with those sorts of symptoms that we would just call like a flu-like illness, like fevers, myalgias or muscle aches, joint aches, headache.

And then it progresses to a severe respiratory disease.

illness, basically respiratory failure.

It can.

And so if you look at it from a very basic science standpoint, how the infectious particle impacts the human body, it basically affects the capillaries and it causes them to become leaky.

And the mechanisms for that aren't understood.

But in the Americas,

For severe disease, that leak is in the lungs.

Exactly.

These are folks who need ventilators.

Yep.