Wendy Zuckerman
speaker
3,659 appearances
16 recordings
3 series
first heard May 2020
last heard 2 Jul
Wendy Zuckerman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
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.
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.
Showing 1621–1640 of 3,659 · page 82 of 183
← Previous
Next →