Wendy Zuckerman

This is like an artificial lung where doctors take your blood out, put oxygen in it and then pump it all back into your body.

Michelle told us that she'll hook people up to the ECMO basically to buy them some time while the virus runs its course.

Michelle told us what it was like for some of her patients.

She talked to producer Michelle Dang about it.

So that's part of what makes Hunter virus so scary.

It can sneak up on you and you can get sick really fast and even die.

And there's no vaccine to prevent it.

So you, me, we don't want to get a nasty case of Hunter virus.

How do people get infected in the first place?

Now, Hantavirus is actually found all over the world.

We've seen it on every continent except Antarctica.

It's often carried by rodents, but it's also found in animals like bats, moles, and shrews.

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.