Wendy Zuckerman

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.

I guess that is what deep kissing is at the heart of it.

Other risk factors in that study were sleeping in the same bed, having sex and being exposed to semen.

And on this point, we found another study from 2023 that tracked a 55-year-old man who got infected with the Andes virus and later recovered.

But get this, almost six years later, traces of the virus could still be found in his semen.

So remember the R-naught from the height of the COVID pandemic.

This is basically the number that scientists calculate to say if you get disease X, how many susceptible people will you pass it on to on average?

And for some diseases, this is super high, like measles.

famous for being incredibly contagious if you're not vaccinated.