Professor May Ruchil

It can get suspended into the very small particles in the air, which is how then humans can get exposed to that particular virus.

or these small particles that carry the virus for a prolonged period of time.

And that's how often humans get the disease.

And obviously we know with the airborne transmissions, when you're in close contact settings, that's where the risk goes up.

That is the most common way.

There's one particular type of hantavirus, the Andes virus, which occurs in that Argentinian, South American region where there have been some studies that have suggested that there can be some human-to-human transmission, but that seems to be early on.

And in very few limited cases, the most frequently dominant, I guess, traditional way or dominant way of transmission, as I said, is from exposure directly to rodent droppings, urine, saliva.

So it's a zoonotic infection that you get essentially through that contact pathway.

So I understand that people, you know, outbreaks as outbreak epidemiologists as well, we find it really interesting of how people have become aware, but I totally understand that people tend to vary.

There's a lot of, as you said at the start, as we were talking, there's a lot of memories and flashback, you know, COVID early days, we saw like,

a couple of large cruise ships become epicenters or outbreaks really start in that.

In the Australian context, we had the Ruby Princess incident.

So there are some fresh memories.

It's not that long ago that we were having these conversations in relation to COVID.

So I can understand that it evokes this emotion and people have this fear.

People also have, I guess, curiosity as well.

I think people have become more aware.

But what I would say at the moment is there's a lot of unknowns.

It's very concerning and it's very sad that we've had these cases and that some lives have been lost.

I think that's really sad.