Wendy Zuckerman

This version of Hantavirus that led to the relatively small outbreak on the cruise ship, it's been known to science since 1996, 30 years ago, when Macarena was number one on the charts.

And in that time, three decades, it really hasn't mutated, particularly when you compare it to viruses that have caused pandemics.

So put it all together.

This virus does not spread easily between people, which is why when an odd outbreak has happened before, it doesn't tend to blow up.

And so far, this virus hasn't been mutating to become better at transmitting between people.

So when we asked Anne the big question of this episode, the question that so many of you guys had,

is this going to be the next pandemic?

Here's what she said.

And other researchers that we spoke to said the same thing.

And I know you might be feeling, hey, some of you scientists said COVID would be fine too, and look what happened.

And at the beginning of the pandemic, scientists were making educated guesses about what was going on and how the virus was going to behave, and they got stuff wrong.

With this hunter virus that's causing the outbreak, the Andes version, scientists have been studying it for 30 years.

And we know that scary outbreaks tend to be pretty small.

But still, if you want to be careful, if you're cleaning up a space that might have rodent poo, wear a mask.

And if you have a friend that just got off a cruise ship, avoid deep kisses.

That's science versus.

This episode has more than 80 citations in it.

If you want to read more about Hunter virus, understand where we get all of our information from.

There's a link to our transcript in the show notes.

Go check it out.