Doctor VTuber Explains Hantavirus

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]What the heck is a hantavirus?

[00:00:01]Everyone's asking if we have a new pandemic on our hands, but it's important to break down the facts that we know about the virus and understand the developing information as it comes.

[00:00:10]But also, I'm having flashbacks to 2019 and MS2 year microbio where our professor just quickly went over things like poxvirus, coronavirus, or hantavirus and said they were low yield because we'd never see them in clinical practice. So, okay. So, if you're a nerd, hantaviruses are negative-sense RNA segmented enveloped viruses with a helical capsid.

[00:00:30]Shout out to the Bunyaviridae Sketchy Microbe bit. They're zoonotic viruses that are transmitted from rodents like the western deer mouse or the bank vole to humans through droplets that contain the virus particles. The viruses are found in the animal's droppings, urine, and saliva and become airborne when cleaning up or sweeping up the area of infected rats. Hantavirus has the highest clinical incidence in South America and the southwestern US and worse in rural areas with less controlled sanitation. It's called hantavirus because the first cases were identified in 1951 among human soldiers stationed near the Hantan River during the Korean War. In humans, hantavirus infection causes generalized inflammation leading to endothelial damage causing increased vascular permeability or leaky capillaries. Two unique diseases that it can cause are hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, HPS, and hemorrhagic fever with renal failure syndrome, HRFS. In HPS, a few days of flu-like symptoms spiral into full-on pulmonary edema and shock requiring ICU level care. This carries a 30 to 40% mortality rate. In HRFS, the namesake triad of fever, internal bleeding, and kidney failure occur. And this has a 3 to 15% mortality rate. The most common causes of HPS are from the Sin Nombre virus in North America and the Andes virus in South America. Sin Nombre virus is transmitted by the western deer mouse and behaves as most other hantaviruses do, having a big outbreak in the southwestern US in 1993. Andes virus is transmitted by the long-tailed pygmy rice rat and had a bad outbreak in Argentina and Chile in 1995 to 1996.

[00:01:58]This is significant because it revealed the first ever human-to-human transmission of Hantavirus and remains a big concern for this cruise ship situation. So, the MV Hondius Hantavirus outbreak is an ongoing case, but the short of it is that the ship left from Argentina on April 1st and a passenger died on April 11th. The body was removed from the ship on April 24th, my birthday, in Saint Helena, a small island in between South America and Africa. At that time, the passenger's wife and 29 other passengers also disembarked the ship. The wife then flew to South Africa and was shortly admitted to a hospital in Johannesburg. She died on April 26th. Of the remaining people on the ship, a third passenger died on May 2nd. There are currently eight suspected cases, five confirmed cases, and three deaths. As of today, May 7th, the WHO has confirmed that the Hantavirus strain identified in two of the deceased victims is the Andes virus strain that can transmit between humans.

[00:02:52]The ship is still sailing and as of yesterday is en route to Tenerife, where they expect to disembark the remaining passengers and evacuate them to their home countries for further treatment. So far, the WHO has done a good job of tracking the passengers and close contacts, but a droplet transmission disease is always precariously staged to get out of control, especially in close contact situations like in airplanes.

[00:03:15]One of the flight attendants on the initial patient's wife's flight was already admitted to a hospital due to infection suspicion. As a viral disease, there's no specific cure at the moment other than to provide aggressive medical support in an ICU setting to fight off the impending cardiopulmonary collapse.

[00:03:31]More cases have been identified since then, but for now, we have no evidence to support that this situation points towards pandemic levels. The passengers have all been tracked and in America, the CDC has already began to closely monitor the six asymptomatic American passengers that have returned to Arizona, California, Georgia, and Virginia. It is certainly an outbreak, but the public health risk is still much lower than what we were dealing with during COVID.