Wendy Zuckerman

So Anne told us that to understand what makes the Anders version capable of spreading, we can compare the two.

One difference is in a protein that sits on the outside of the virus and helps it to break into cells in our body.

If you think about the cells in your body like a house with a tiny little door, GP is the key that allows Hantavirus to open that door, break into our cells, and infect us.

One study found that the Andes virus also seems to replicate faster in, say, heart tissue compared to other versions of Hunter virus.

So potentially, when you get infected with this Andes version, there's just more viral bits in your body and you have a higher viral load, which could then increase the chance that you go on to infect someone else.

And we have examples from other outbreaks that illustrate how this can all play out.

So in Argentina, back in 2018 to 2019, we saw one of the biggest Andes virus outbreaks ever recorded.

Scientists think that it started when one person got exposed to the virus the usual way, from a rodent, and then... So went to a birthday party, was feeling symptomatic, but...

Yeah, so it spread at the birthday party.

Someone died from that infection.

And then at their wake, other people got infected.

Ultimately, researchers tracked 34 cases and 11 people died.

Scientists were able to trace this all pretty well and even test people's blood.

And they found that those who had more virus inside their body were more likely to spread the Andes virus to other people.

But what's interesting is that we don't actually know exactly how the virus is spreading from person to person.

Is it through coughing, through breathing, through touching?

Scientists think that generally speaking, you see really close contacts here.

having a higher chance of spreading it to each other so not just someone you're passing at the supermarket say and we know this for example from a study on a cluster of people who got infected in Chile and they found that sexual contact was a big risk factor for spreading it and in particular the paper references deep kissing that was one of the biggest risk factors they found and

And they mentioned deep kissing a lot.

They defined it only as exposure to saliva.