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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Even with this cruise ship outbreak, so far at least, it's hardly gone bananas.
In over a month, so far we've had about a dozen people infected...
Now, in this outbreak, it's worth pointing out that while there were early reports that a woman got infected after just sitting on a plane near someone who was on the cruise ship and later died of Hantavirus, it now looks like that's not true.
The woman on the flight later tested negative.
So here's where we are at.
Hantavirus, when you compare it to other scary and contagious viruses, it does not spread easily from person to person.
But also, your chance of getting a nasty case of hunter virus from a rodent is also pretty low.
Michelle, who's our doctor from New Mexico, who's seen how devastating hunter viruses can be, and she lives in a place where the rodents can be infected with hunter virus and people every now and then get infected.
So Michelle Dang, our producer, asked her,
But the broader point is that even though there's a lot of mice scurrying around New Mexico carrying this virus, pooing and weeing all over the place, and around 2 million people live there, doctors diagnose fewer than 10 cases a year.
Anne, our virologist, told us that there might be something else working in our favour here too.
Although we mentioned before the break that hantavirus can have this long incubation period where you can have two months between getting infected and showing symptoms, which, yes, is a long time.
Even Anne said... This is crazy to me.
But she also said that unlike COVID...
it's not clear that you can actually spread the disease during that time.
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.
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