Raina MacIntyre

We can't say definitively where they acquired it.

On probabilities, it's likely they picked it up in Argentina because they'd actually...

been travelling around Argentina but also Uruguay and Chile since November.

But when you look at the incubation period of the virus and the husband got ill on the 6th of April, that's when he started feeling unwell, the likelihood is that he picked it up somewhere in Argentina and there's been speculation about a rubbish tip on the island where the cruise set off but the local health authorities have denied it.

Yes.

In fact, Argentina is one of a small handful of countries that has the Andes variant of the hantavirus, which is the only one that's documented to spread from human to human.

Right.

And the incidence of hantavirus seems to have been going up last year.

So there was an uptick in

cases and outbreaks last year, which was a bit of a warning sign that this could be a risk for travellers.

Yeah, so hantaviruses typically are first spread from rats to humans through their excreta, both urine and faeces, and those can get aerosolised in dust particles and so on and breathed in, or occasionally from touching contaminated stuff, but usually it's thought that it's breathed in.

It occurs around the world, but the European and Asian cases of hantavirus are a different category.

hantavirus and they're not as severe.

It's the Andes virus that causes the most severe illness.

It's spread through the air, through respiratory aerosols.

So it's inhaled.

We don't have data to say, you know, close contact.

Certainly the last big outbreak of Andes hantavirus in 2018, which was also in Argentina, was

but a different type of the Andes virus.

The Andes virus also has what's called clades.