Professor May Ruchil

Should they be worried?

Are we going to see travel restrictions?

Are we going to see lockdowns?

But all of that at the moment, the risk of global spread at the moment is low.

So what we're seeing at the moment is that people have had this severe respiratory infection.

So hantavirus typically presents as respiratory infection, and it has two main forms of the disease that it progresses into.

And they seem to be very different in different parts of the world.

So typically in the Americas region, as we say, so the North American and the South American region together, we tend to see what's called the more pulmonary syndrome.

So it's more to do with the lungs.

Whereas in Europe and Asia, we tend to see more of the hemorrhagic fever that attacks your kidneys and it's more systemic fever, et cetera.

So there's very different presentation.

And while the infection overall is rare globally,

We don't see that many cases.

Over the years, we've seen probably less than 1,000 cases in the America's region over the years as well.

But the challenge is that it's high fatality.

Essentially, the percentage or the mortality rate, as we say, can be quite high.

So in the America's region where it's pulmonary syndrome, we can, you know, about 50%, almost up to 30% to 50% of the people who contract the infection can die.

And

In the other parts, about 1% to 15%.

Again, because we don't see a lot of these cases, these are largely estimates of what we've seen so far.