What are the origins of hantavirus? How the virus tied to the cruise ship outbreak came to be.

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Rodents, we know they carry hantavirus, but what is its origin story? Well, it turns out hantavirus may have been living around us for at least a thousand years and probably even longer. Some of the first records we have are from ancient China around the year 1000 where doctors were writing about some kind of mystery illness that caused fever, internal bleeding, and kidney failure.

[00:00:20]And modern scientists now, which the National Institutes of Health point out, think it could have been hantavirus precisely because of that kidney failure. Fast forward to the early 1900s and similar outbreaks started showing up in Russia, in Sweden, and in Finland, according to the CDC. A lot of those cases were in soldiers and in farmers, and where there are farms, there are probably going to be rodents, and their symptoms were similar with headaches, with fevers, and kidney damage, but were caused by different strains of hantavirus that we know now. During World War II, it got really bad. More than 10,000 cases hit Japanese soldiers in Manchuria. This is in northeastern China that Japan had taken control and where their armies were based. At the same time, on the European front of the war, about 1,000 Germans got sick in Finland when residents basically took over military bunkers. And it turns out that blood samples that were taken from survivors there half a century later did find antibodies for hantavirus. Again, all this from the National Institutes of Health. But here is where it gets interesting. It's the Korean War. Around 3,000 UN troops got sick near the front line of the fighting with North Korea. At that time, they were calling it Korean hemorrhagic fever, and it was all happening near a river called the Hantan River. And yeah, you can see where this is going now. But it still took about 25 years or so in 1978 for anyone to actually really figure out what this illness was. And that was with South Korean virologist Professor Ho Wang Lee. And he found fragments of proteins from a virus in a striped field mouse that had been trapped right by the Hantan River. And finally, this mystery that had been around for potentially a thousand years had a name, Hanta virus. Now, here is where it splits into two, and this part matters for what's happening right now.

[00:02:22]The Hanta viruses that go after kidneys, our kidneys, are called Old World strains from Asia, from Russia, and from Europe. But then, there is a whole other group now, New World Hanta viruses found in the Americas, and these ones go after your lungs, and they kill faster, and they kill more painfully with a higher rate of fatality, up to 40% for New World Hanta viruses versus up to 15% for the Old World strains. And then in 1993, the US got a massive wake-up call with its first known outbreak of New World Hanta virus in humans. This outbreak hit the Four Corners region. This is where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah all meet, and it came to light after a young Native American marathon runner died of respiratory failure. The CDC then recorded 30 cases and then 20 deaths across the whole entire US Southwest. That's two out of three people who died. Let that sink in.

[00:03:25]Then in 2012, Yosemite National Park had its own outbreak. 10 people there got sick from rodent infestations in cabins there, and three of those people died.

[00:03:36]And that brings us to right now, the Andes strain, which is also a New World Hanta virus, and the only known Hanta virus that spreads person to person, like on that ship, the MV Hondius, that we were reporting about in in Canary Islands. And that is why hantavirus is unfortunately now a household word around the world.