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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.

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Show Me the Science with Luke O'Neill · The Science of Hantavirus · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

And the reason for that is the virus gets inside the endothelial cells, that's the cell type, in your blood vessels, damages them and now the blood begins to leak out and you see blood beginning to pool out.

in your skin, sadly, and various parts of your body because it's hemorrhagic.

And that can be a feature of this in the most severe case.

Now, when it escalates to that level, then you're in trouble and there can be a high mortality.

They reckon about 60% of people can die if it progresses, especially into your lungs and your kidney, then you're going to be in trouble.

The overall fatality rate is about 15%.

But if it gets into your lungs and really gets a foothold,

then we're in trouble and we begin to see severe disease.

Now, people who are in that situation, they can go on life support, they can go on ventilators and various things, but it's to be avoided, obviously, to get that far.

The trouble is there's no real treatment, sadly.

So the kind of care you give people is just to support them and hope their bodies can recover from this.

You can give them anti-inflammatory steroids, various things to suppress some of the injury, but it's very hard to stop once it gets going.

But it's extremely rare.

I mean, not many people will die of this in the end.

hopefully anyway.

And in a big outbreak though, and there have been a few outbreaks, now we're talking 10 to 20 people in total, you do see 30 to 60% mortality.

So it's quite serious.

Now, when it's in the body, it gets inside the cells.

On the surface of the hantavirus is N-protein, a bit like with COVID as well.

That's in a spike.

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