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

You get really sick and you're less likely to spread it.

So again, that made us less fearful of this one.

we thought, oh, look, it's not going to become like COVID because illness happens and then people are unlikely to go to work or to go to school, whatever it is, and therefore less likely to spread it.

So again, we weren't as fearful of this one as we were because it's very, very hard to catch.

Now, all that knowledge that we're building up then could be useful in the future.

It's rare, remember, we may see other outbreaks because of what's happening with climate change and so on.

We know the main features and we've learned even more now.

from this Hondias ship outbreak, which will be very useful to us.

And I guess most importantly of all, they're now making a vaccine, just in case, right?

Now, the vaccine is based on RNA technology, just like the COVID vaccine.

They're deploying the same kind of technology.

They're also using a technology that was in the AstraZeneca vaccine that was used for COVID.

So now we're going to have vaccines as well against Hanta, should we see anything untoward.

And even if we don't and the cases are rare and, you know, there's an outbreak somewhere, you could vaccinate quickly then to protect people.

So again, I see this as a COVID dividend that we can now make a vaccine very quickly against antivirus.

Of course, they're watching it closely anyway to see if a new variant emerges.

Slim chance of that, it must be said.

But still, it's something being monitored all the time.

So we've learned an awful lot from the COVID pandemic that we could deploy should something happen with antivirus.

And the chances are very slim.

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