DR STEVE PRESENTS: Hantavirus, The Next Pandemic? (TL;DR: NO)

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:01]Hey, it's your old pal, Dr. Steve from Weird Medicine, and we need to talk about the haunt virus.

[00:00:06]>> I want to requ >> So, a lot of malarkey in the news, some of it. I mean, listen, it's tragic.

[00:00:26]There was a haunt virus outbreak on a cruise ship and uh there have been deaths associated with it. It's a very rare virus generally caused by rodents causes serious illness in those people infected usually um causes difficulty breathing, low oxygen and uh kidney failure. Now there are a lot of variants of the haunt virus but only one is known to transmit from person to person. So normal haunt virus you get it from a rodent you can't give it to anybody else or it's very difficult. So in the early prod phase it seems like any other viral infection you know fatigue, muscle aches, headaches, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and then it progresses to being severe and uh you end up with low oxygen, shortness of breath, cough and then very often emergency care symptoms appear anywhere from 1 to six weeks after exposure which makes it very difficult to pin down and it can last from several days to several weeks. We don't have any treatment for this yet. It's been kind of an orphan condition in the sense that there's not a lot of research dollars being put into it because we just haven't seen that many cases. But let's talk about how this happened. So, patient zero in this cruise ship outbreak was Dutch ornithologist Leo Schilper.

[00:01:57]I'm sure I'm pronouncing that incorrectly.

[00:02:00]He was 70. They were on a fivemonth trip to South America. That must be nice.

[00:02:07]They landed in Argentina on November 27th, traveled through Chile, Uruguay, and then back to Argentina in late March. But they went on a fateful bird watching adventure. They visited a landfill four miles outside of this city, and the spot is overrun with trash. It's avoided like the plague by its residents. Very funny. Uh New York Post. Yes. But it serves as a pilgrimage for bird watchers from all over the world in search of a rare creature, the whitethroatated carara. Caracara, nicknamed Darwin's Caracara after its fame evolutionary biologist, uh Charles Darwin, the first to collect it.

[00:02:56]So bird watching. Okay. Well, listen, I have a synthesizer collection and I do ham radio, so who am I to talk?

[00:03:07]Um, but uh they feel that um, you know, Argentinian authorities suspect they inhaled particles from the feces of longtailed pygmy rice rats, which carry the feared Andes strain of the haunt virus. And the reason the hunt Andes strain is so feared is it's the only one as I mentioned that can be transmitted from person to person.

[00:03:33]What's common from bird watchers to visit landfills because there are many birds there. But good lord, can you imagine?

[00:03:41]Oh, it's a mountain of waste that today far exceeds the limit initially established by the authorities. So people are just still bringing trash here. And there's the the offending bird for that this all happened.

[00:04:00]So uh they weren't alone though. There was 112 other people.

[00:04:04]And uh but on April 6th he reported having fever, headache, stomach pain, diarrhea, and he died on the ship 5 days later. Very tragic.

[00:04:14]Um she survived and uh but she was sick and she collapsed at the airport and then died the next day. So she thought she had escaped, but of course this well I don't know what she thought, but it looked like perhaps she had escaped unscathed, but the um uh incubation time unfortunately got her.

[00:04:42]So um there were at least seven Americans were on their airlink flight that are back and two New Jersey residents. It doesn't say anything whether they are ill or not. There's no specific treatment for this. It's focused on supporting the patient through the infection. Now let's talk some math. So the uh Andesto virus has a documented humanto human basic reproduction number of 2.12. So if you remember this from coronavirus pandemic, the basic reproduction number is the number of people someone could infect given an ideal situation and a vulnerable population.

[00:05:27]Uh and in this case it's 2.12 which means that if one person gives it to two people, two people give it to four, four give it to eight. And so you're worried, oh, this thing could be have a geometric expansion and um uh would it could this be a problem? Now, uh to calculate herd immunity, which is not really an issue in this because we don't have herd immunity to this, uh the uh formula is 1 - 1 over the r sub0. So it's 1 over 2.

[00:06:02]So it would be 1 minus 1/2. So it' be 0.5. So 50% of the population would have to have immunity to this to have herd immunity and that's not going to happen.

[00:06:13]But the R subnot is ideal population.

[00:06:16]There's a thing called the R subt and that is the basic transmission number in a an actual population and for this it is almost certainly less than one and it's probably significantly less than one.

[00:06:34]Now during the uh 2019 outbreak in Argentina the median reproductive number was estimated 2.12 but after uh control measures which was just quarantine and isolation of the people who were infected reduced it to 0.96. So anything less than one if you can hold it there means that the virus will fade away and eventually disappear. The exact numerical R subt value fluctuates based on based on outbreak circumstance. Of course, one of the reasons this thing spread in the cruise ship is because prolonged close contact with people's body fluids and that can be droplets as well, uh urine, feces, vomitus, uh which where are you going to get that more than on a cruise ship. So, they don't really have a good estimate for this. Let's see. Yeah, they just don't know what the R subt is, but it's also it's very low. It says it has a low effective reproduction number compared to common respiratory viruses because persontoperson transmission is rare and generally limited to close intimate or prolonged contact rather than efficient airborne spread. So the question is that people have asked me is this the next pandemic and the answer is without a some sort of insane uh mutation uh the answer is almost certainly no. As a matter of fact it is certainly no. This should be compi combined to this uh population and we've demonstrated that isolating and quarantining contacts and patients who are displaying symptoms can reduce the reproductive number to less than one, meaning that it can be effectively contained without locking things down or doing any stupid things. I would like to see uh some research done on effective treatment for this because wouldn't it be nice if the next time this happens on a cruise ship uh and I'd like to see this for Nora virus as well that you just take uh a medication that has antiviral properties and uh that that's the end of it. We have that for uh corona virus SARS cove 2. Now we have several medications that are quite effective for keeping people out of the hospital and preventing death including uh early administration of rememir um mulapira and um paxlovid.

[00:09:11]So we don't really need a whole lot else. You get it, you go take the medicine, you don't go to the hospital, you don't die for the most part. And uh that would be nice for Norovirus because I would like to take a cruise but I'm not taking a damn cruise till they figure something out with this effing Norwok virus. I hate to puke more than anything. Uh Dan Nadderman and I share one thing in common. Well, well, we share many things in common, but one of the things we share in common is we are both a metobes. And an aophobe is someone that has an I would say irrational.

[00:09:48]Dan would say not irrational at all. Uh fear of vomiting and uh hate that more than anything. Anyway, all right. So, I just wanted to get that out. We do not need to fear the haunt virus. Very tragic that people have already been infected and those that have died and those that will die in the future uh from this virus. So, we do need to uh put some money into research, but for right now, uh absolutely no evidence that this thing has any potential for causing a pandemic or becoming endemic or anything of the sort. So, in the meantime, avoid contact with the feces, particularly aerosolized feces of the long-tailed pygmy rice rat. If you go to Argentina, um yeah, let's not go to the landfill.

[00:10:38]Maybe the white breasted cara can uh uh just live in peace and uh we can do without that one anyway. All right, take care everybody.