Chapter 1: What outbreak is causing concern on the cruise ship?
Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and this is Science Versus. The show that pits facts against another friggin' pandemic? Today on the show, Hunter virus.
Chapter 2: What happens if you get infected with hantavirus?
There's been a lot of reports of an outbreak of a weird virus on the MV Hondias cruise ship. What began as a cruise of a lifetime has instead turned into a major medical mystery and an international crisis.
Three people have died amid outbreak of hantavirus on a cruise ship sailing the Atlantic.
The first cases seemed to have started with a husband and wife that boarded after a birdwatching expedition. The couple ended up dying, along with one other passenger. And over the next few weeks, more cases have started rolling out.
Chapter 3: How does hantavirus spread between individuals?
A French national has tested positive for Hantavirus following her evacuation from the cruise liner MV Hondias. Now her condition is said to be deteriorating. 18 American passengers from the Hantavirus affected cruise ship are now being monitored at two facilities in the United States.
One patient has tested positive and is now in a biocontainment unit in Omaha, Nebraska.
Global health officials warning there are now 11 total cases of the deadly hantavirus, adding that number could go up as the virus can incubate for 42 days.
Chapter 4: How effective is hantavirus at spreading compared to other viruses?
And one thing that's really worrying here is just how deadly this virus is. Something like 40% of people who get diagnosed with it will die. And scariest still, according to news reports, it feels like this Hantavirus outbreak is weird because it's spreading from person to person.
Experts are confirming there have been cases of a rare strain on the ship that can be transmitted between humans.
Meanwhile, officials have been scrambling to track down some people who left the cruise ship before they knew Hantavirus was on board. No surprises, the internet is freaking out.
Hantavirus will spread.
It absolutely will get worse.
Why did they let the people off the boat? Why'd you let them off the boat? Why did you let them off the boat?
Everybody better wake the f*** up with this Hantavirus bulls***.
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Chapter 5: Is this hantavirus outbreak likely to cause the next pandemic?
We're not doing it again. The Hantavirus, Animontanavirus. This is crazy. History is about to repeat itself. I have seen this film before, COVID-19. I want to watch a new film, The Titanic. And I'm getting very, very anxious, very nervous, and they should have sank that motherf***ing ship where they had the chance.
So today on the show, what is going on with Hunter virus? What happens if you get infected? How is it spreading? And how worried do we need to be here? Could this be the next pandemic? When it comes to Hunter virus, there's a lot of people saying... We're not doing it again. And then there's science. Science versus Hunter virus is coming up just after the break. Welcome back.
Today we're talking all about Hantavirus. And this is the first time a lot of us have even heard of this virus. So we're going to break down exactly what it is, starting with what happens if you get infected. Because on the cruise ship, the three passengers died within just a few days of their symptoms starting, which is very scary. So we wanted to know how things can escalate so quickly.
And for this, we called out Professor Michelle Harkins.
I am a pulmonary and critical care physician at the University of New Mexico.
And she's treated dozens of Hantavirus patients in the ICU. And she told us that there are a couple of dozen different types of hunter viruses that can infect humans. The one that Michelle generally sees in New Mexico is called the Sinombre virus. And it is a lot like the version that popped up on the cruise ship. Yeah, they're in the same family. We can call them relatives.
So if you get infected with hantavirus and you have all these viral particles in your body, they tend to attack and go after this specific type of cell.
So this virus likes a particular cell, the endothelial cell, and it lines all the blood vessels. It lines a lot of the cells in the lung.
What happens from here is that your body starts to mount an immune response to get rid of this invader. And that's often when you can start to get sick in a way that Michelle says might feel pretty familiar at first.
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Chapter 6: What are the symptoms of hantavirus infection?
She's a friend of the show. We've had her on before. And Anne told us that when she heard about this Hunter virus outbreak.
I wasn't happy. So as a virologist, you never like hearing about a virus that is doing something unusual. On top of that, she was like, and it's happening on a cruise ship that's traveling all around the world with passengers from all around the global community who are then going to disperse. That's not a good setup. You're like, oh, no. Oh, no.
I don't want my virologist saying, oh, no. But don't worry, because by the end of this episode, you'll be thinking, oh, yes, because you'll know more science. And that's always great.
Okay, so as we mentioned, this version of hunter virus that's roaming around the cruise ship is the only one we know that can transmit from person to person, which makes it different to the one that we heard about from the doctor, Michelle, which was called Synombre. So Anne told us that to understand what makes the Anders version capable of spreading, we can compare the two.
So let's take Andes versus Synombre. So if you were to look at those two haunted viruses, they're pretty highly related. But there's regions that are a little bit different between Synombre, which doesn't spread human to human, and Andes that does.
One difference is in a protein that sits on the outside of the virus and helps it to break into cells in our body.
So for coronavirus, for analogy, we think about spike, right? The spike protein. So on Andy's virus, instead of they don't have spike, we call it glycoprotein, so GP.
If you think about the cells in your body like a house with a tiny little door, GP is the key that allows Hantavirus to open that door, break into our cells, and infect us.
So these GP proteins are a little bit different on Andes virus. And the consequence is, at least on the sort of infection level, is the Andes virus can infect a wider range of cells.
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