Hantavirus: what we know about the cruise ship outbreak
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So you might think you're listening to What's That Rash? But you're actually listening to the first episode of Hantacast.
Oh my gosh, don't wish that upon us. This actually is the old Coronacast feed if you're subscribed to What's That Rash? And we're going back to our roots today because we're talking about a viral outbreak. It's Norman and Tegan. We're here for a bonus episode of what? Yeah, fine, fine, fine. Let's call it Hantacast. Why not?
Indeed. And we're not going to be talking about bats. We're going to be talking about rats.
Aha, exactly. So, okay, let's start with some basics briefly, Norman. What is hantavirus? Where does it come from? What's going on here?
Well, nobody knew it existed probably until probably 50 years ago or so. And it's called hantavirus because the first outbreak, known outbreak, to Western medicine, shall I say, was along the Hantan River, hence hanta, Hantan River in Korea during the Korean War. 3,000 or thereabouts United Nations troops came down with a hemorrhagic fever. So fever, bleeding, and it also affected their kidneys, and they got kidney failure, and a high percentage of them died. So several hundred of them died. And it's thought that in fact they might have taken the virus, the American troops might have taken the virus back to the United States. So we wouldn't know what it was. You had this outbreak of this mysterious disease which affected thousands of troops and it caused a fair bit of panic and consternation.
There was no known treatment. And it took a controversial Nobel laureate called Kartan Gajdacek—he wasn't a Nobel laureate in those days—who, in fact, was the person who elucidated Kuru— the brain disease in Papua New Guinea, along with Western Australian researchers. But he was the one who actually isolated the Hantavirus and was the first person to do so and discovered what it was. And in fact, this was not a new disease. It had been there for centuries, if not thousands of years, along the banks of the river in the Hantan River. Almost certainly the local people had some immunity to this disease because it was an ancient disease in that area. But you've got these non-immune troops coming in, stirring up the land with their tanks and camping and goodness, what else they were doing, stressing the rodents, mice in that area.
And they caught the disease from the mouse droppings. So that was the first known outbreak of Hantavirus in terms of Western medicine.
What is hantavirus and how did it originate?
And the reason we're talking about it now is because there has been an outbreak of Hantavirus on a cruise ship, the MV Hondias. The outbreak was first described in South America. What was sort of the original presentation of this outbreak, Norman?
Let me just go back a little bit before I go jump into this, because what I didn't say there was that since the discovery of the original hantavirus, it's now known as a family of viruses which exist in different parts of the world. In the United States, it tends to be in a pulmonary form rather than a hemorrhagic form. So your lungs... Yep. And it looks as though that's what Gene Hackman's wife died of.
Oh, yes.
So it's a nasty disease which can be rapidly fatal. And the Andean version is a respiratory disease which... Which looks as though it can spread human to human. Well, in fact, it can spread human to human. The other hantaviruses don't convincingly spread human to human. The Andean version of the virus does seem to spread human to human, but inefficiently. It doesn't do it. It's not like measles or coronavirus or influenza where you've got... A large percentage of people who come in contact with the virus getting infected and then passing it on to others.
So when you're saying the Andean version of the virus, is that what we're dealing with with this outbreak in the cruise ship at the moment?
That's what's being reported, yes. Now, not a lot's known about it. They talk about a six-week, you might have read, a six-week incubation period before the symptoms come out.
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