Professor Luke O'Neill
speaker
1,535 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 3 Sep
Professor Luke O'Neill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.
Appearances
which actually can jump between humans.
It's the Andes strain first seen in South America.
So it's no surprise that the Hondias incident began in South America.
And that's the unusual one.
Not many can jump from one human to another.
Even if it does jump from one human to another, it's still very difficult to catch, actually.
You must be at very, very close quarters.
By far and away, the majority of cases of hanta are catching it from a rodent.
Very important to say that.
And when the hantavirus thing was happening on the Hondias,
Will it be the next pandemic?
I said, no, this is not going to be the next pandemic because it's mainly from rodent to human and it's very difficult to go from human to human, unlike SARS-CoV-2, which readily passed from human to human, as we would remember.
Now, of course, one of the fears was when it was first detected, maybe it had changed and maybe now there was a version that could jump from human to human more readily.
That would have been frightening now if that happened.
We could have been looking at the vista of another pandemic, or horrible as it may seem.
But as soon as they got the sequence of the virus, they identified it very quickly.
They realized it was the old-fashioned Andy strain that had been described decades before.
And it does jump from human to human, only under unusual circumstances, as I'll explain.
Now, the other thing to say is that when it was first described, it was described in Korea.
During the Korean War, soldiers came down with it near the Hanta River, and it was named after that river.
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