Professor May Ruchil

Yeah.

Hi, Tash.

Thanks for having me on the show.

So, Hantavirus is a group of viruses that exist, I guess, in the nature, in rodents mostly.

The natural reservoir for that is rodents.

And it's a group of viruses, essentially, that mostly spreads to humans from, I guess, exposure to rodents via urine, saliva, droppings, etc., etc.,

but it's through airborne transmissions.

And we don't usually see it very commonly in humans.

Human infections are rare.

Yes, it's been around for a long time.

It exists in many rodents, as I've said.

It's just we don't always diagnose it.

We don't always detect it, but it's been around for a long time.

And it's a different, you know, as I said, it's a group of viruses.

It's a family of viruses and different areas and parts of the world also have different species of the virus as well.

Yeah, so there's a couple of different ways, I guess.

The most common way of contracting or exposure and how humans might catch the disease is when there's, you know, contamination of, say, food items or urine.

So there's rats passing, rodents passing, and urine's been sprayed on surfaces or there's rabbits' feces, droppings of the feces or saliva droppings from these rodents.

And because it's a virus that can then get aerosolized, so you'll remember from COVID times, we talked about airborne transmission.

Basically, the virus can go from these exposures into the air.