Hantavirus is typically spread by rodents <\/a>through feces, urine and saliva. People become infected when they breathe particles in the air containing the virus. It can spread anytime, but previous cases have been reported in the spring and summer when there is more rodent activity and while people were sweeping during spring cleaning, not realizing that rodents had been hibernating in warm corners of their home for the winter. <\/p>\nThere have been a handful of documented cases of transmission through contact with other infected people. That type of spread has been linked to only one strain of the virus, called the Andes strain, found in South America, which is primarily carried by a species of rodent called the pygmy rice rat. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe majority of hantaviruses cannot be spread through human-to-human spread,\u201d said Sabra Klein, a professor in the molecular microbiology and immunology department at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. \u201cThis happens to be the only one. It is still unbelievably rare.\u201d<\/p>\n
While other viruses, like Covid and flu, are transmitted easily between people \u2014 through sneezes or while eating with infected people \u2014 Klein said it\u2019s incredibly difficult to spread the Andes strain. <\/p>\n
\u201cAndes virus, as a hantavirus, requires a significant degree of contact with bodily fluids,\u201d she said. \u201cIn the original reports that came out in the early 2000s, case studies show spread between married couples, people who live together and are intimate. That is where you have the spread.\u201d<\/p>\n
Case reports of person-to-person spread have been documented over the years, but there has been little research into the science behind those clusters. For instance, doctors and scientists have no idea how much virus in bodily fluid is enough to infect another person.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not really understood,\u201d said Dr. Shauna Gunaratne, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no cure or treatment for hantavirus. Doctors often prescribe supportive care for severe cases, which often includes oxygen therapy and blood pressure medications to stabilize the cardiac and respiratory systems, Gunaratne said.<\/p>\n
The cruise ship departed from Ushuaia, Argentina, on April 1 with 88 passengers and 59 crew members. It stopped at multiple islands across the South Atlantic Ocean and in mainland Antarctica. <\/p>\n
Five days after the ship sailed, a 70-year-old male passenger reported fever, headache and mild diarrhea. After he developed respiratory distress, he died April 11, although the cause of death wasn\u2019t yet determined. <\/p>\n
Nearly two weeks later, his body was removed from the ship when it docked in St. Helena, a British overseas island territory. The man\u2019s wife, 69, was experiencing gastrointestinal symptoms on April 24 when she went ashore at St. Helena. She deteriorated during a flight to Johannesburg and died when she arrived in South Africa on April 26. The third death was that of a woman whose symptoms started April 28. She died five days later, on Saturday. <\/p>\n
Dr. Lucille Blumberg, an infectious disease specialist at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa, was one of the first scientists notified of the mysterious outbreak on the cruise ship and helped point colleagues to test for hantavirus. According to Blumberg, the outbreak could have started after a birding expedition.<\/p>\n
Because the virus is so difficult to spread between people and can take weeks to develop symptoms, Klein isn\u2019t sure how much person-to-person transmission occurred in the outbreak. She did note that two of the people who died were married. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt is so much more likely that either while docked in Argentina, if there was any kind of tourist location that many people went to in Argentina where there could have been exposure to the rodents or if these pygmy rice rats somehow made it onto the ship with supplies, including food, including fresh produce \u2026 that would be how you could also have transmission,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
A race to identify the strain of hantavirus<\/h2>\n
Morgan Gorris, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who has studied the hantavirus, said the first step in figuring out the mode of transmission is to identify the strain. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere are many different hantaviruses that cause disease, and a lot of them are regionally located,\u201d she said. \u201cSo if we can identify which hantavirus caused this disease, that will give us a clue to where the cases originated.\u201d<\/p>\n
Blumberg said it\u2019ll most likely take a few more days to determine the strain.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re doing a sort of deep dive and fingerprint of the virus, and that\u2019s in process right now,\u201d she said. \u201cThose are much more complicated tests. You have to really take a big part of the virus and sequence it.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are nearly 40 strains of hantavirus found all over the world, and different strains cause different illnesses, according to the U.S. CDC. All of them can be severe, though the Andes strain is particularly deadly, killing nearly 40% of those infected. The strain found in the southwestern U.S. called the Sin Nombre strain<\/a> \u2014 the most common type of hantavirus, which was discovered in the U.S. in 1993 \u2014 has a 25% fatality rate.<\/p>\nAs scientists race to identify the strain, almost all of the passengers are still quarantined on the ship. <\/p>\n
\u201cUntil we know where this occurred and how, I think that is why they\u2019re engaging in this quarantining practice,\u201d Klein said. \u201cI know that\u2019s got to be scary; to be scared that you might have been exposed to a virus that\u2019s a hemorrhagic fever virus, that is, that is, that\u2019s very unnerving.\u201d<\/p>\n
While a quarantine on a cruise ship may bring back memories of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the scientists stressed that this is a very different situation. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not like Covid,\u201d Blumberg said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The World Health Organization said Tuesday that some passengers aboard the MV Hondius cruise ship may have been infected with the deadly hantavirus through person-to-person transmission, an extremely rare occurrence that scientists are racing to confirm. Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content. \u201cOur assumption is they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36800,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[171],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health-conditions"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pickbydoc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pickbydoc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pickbydoc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pickbydoc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pickbydoc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36799"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pickbydoc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36801,"href":"https:\/\/pickbydoc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36799\/revisions\/36801"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pickbydoc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/36800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pickbydoc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pickbydoc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pickbydoc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}