Wendy Zuckerman

And usually, just zooming out from the cruise ship outbreak here, people get infected because they come into contact with poo or wee from an infected rodent.

We talked about how this can happen with Neil Vora.

He's a doctor who studies spillover diseases from animals to people.

And as you are sweeping and cleaning the house, any dried up rat crap can kind of turn to dust, go up into the air, and then you breathe that in.

This virus can also survive stomach acid and potentially infect you if you ate food that's contaminated with, say, little bits of rat poo.

The World Health Organization estimates that worldwide, thousands of people get hantavirus every year.

but they're usually infected with a version that's less deadly than the one on the cruise ship.

And we think that the vast majority of these infections worldwide come from direct contact with, say, rodent feces.

But with the outbreak on the cruise ship, something different seems to be unfolding.

So we think that maybe the first infection, patient zero, got exposed this way that we've just described, through aerosolized rat crap dust.

Here's Neil again.

Now, one or two people getting hunter virus directly from breathing in rodent poo or pee, this is not surprising.

Because, like we said, hunter virus is around rodents in a lot of places, including Argentina.

What's weird is that most of the time, when someone gets hunter virus from a rodent, it stops with them.

Most types of hunter virus cannot spread from person to person.

Except the version of hantavirus that showed up on the cruise ship.

It's called the Andes virus, and it can.

And that is probably exactly what happened on the cruise ship.

And something that's worrying a lot of people right now is that we might not know everyone who's been infected.

Because this virus, it can hang around your body for a while before you start showing any symptoms.