00:00Three dead, ships stranded, 149 people aboard, refused entry to port, no disembarkation plan.
00:07You can imagine how scary this is for the people on the ship.
00:11A suspected Hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondias cruise ship has left 150 passengers stranded on board,
00:18sickening at least seven and leaving three dead.
00:21But what exactly is this deadly Andy strain of Hantavirus, and could it be the next pandemic?
00:26The Post spoke with infectious disease specialist Dr. Todd Ellerin to find out.
00:31It starts off like any other virus.
00:33You can have fevers and GI symptoms, and on a cruise ship, you would think that that's norovirus.
00:39But in some of these cases, patients developed very rapid deterioration in their lungs,
00:45you know, what we call respiratory distress syndrome, and some of them died very quickly.
00:50The Dutch couple, the husband and wife, cases one and two, obviously they were married in close contact.
00:55Again, you don't know if both of them were exposed to the same type of rodent, you know, secretions,
01:02or whether the husband gave it to the wife through close contact.
01:07That remains unclear.
01:09And then the third death, the German patient apparently did have close contact with one of the other cases on
01:16the ship.
01:16But other than that, we don't have a lot of details about close contacts on the ship.
01:23There's lots of different Hantavirus around the world.
01:26Most of it is in eastern China, where it's a different form.
01:32It's a hemorrhagic fever that's, you know, when you can have bleeding, and it can cause kidney failure.
01:39But in the Americas, it's a different form.
01:42It's called HPS Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, where you can have sort of a cardiovascular collapse
01:49and a respiratory or pulmonary lung collapse.
01:53Unfortunately, in the Americas, it can be, one of the strains is the Andean strain,
01:58and that can have a mortality between 25 and 50 percent.
02:02So it's the most dangerous and the most mortal of all of the Hantaviruses.
02:06Most of the Hantavirus cannot be transmitted through human-to-human contact,
02:11but the Andean form can be.
02:13It's still rare, but there have been reported cases of human-to-human transmission.
02:18In the Americas, it tends to be a respiratory virus that starts off with nonspecific symptoms,
02:24fevers, gastrointestinal symptoms,
02:26but then very rapidly can affect the heart and lungs and cause a fatal type of pneumonia setup,
02:34or what we call ARDS, which stands for Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome.
02:39Basically, the lungs can get filled up with fluid, and it's very severe.
02:43The most likely way of getting this, of all forms of Hantavirus,
02:47is through close contact with rodent droppings, urine, you know, secretions,
02:53and it is not through human-to-human transmission.
02:55That's why the general population does not have to be concerned about getting this.
02:59This is definitely not the next pandemic.
03:03This Hantavirus, while there can be rare human-to-human transmissions with this Andean strain,
03:09this is not COVID, this is not influenza.
03:12These are not the common respiratory viruses that are easily transmitted from person to person.
03:17And it's still not 100% confirmed that there was human-to-human transmission on the cruise,
03:23although it is definitely a possibility.
03:26If you think about it, when you look at all the Americas,
03:28there's only roughly about 30 cases a year.
03:32When you look at the last, you know, 30 years, there's been under 1,000 cases.
03:38So this does remain very rare.
03:41Again, the general population, this is not a global issue as far as becoming a pandemic or a broader epidemic.
03:51Obviously, on the cruise ship right now, you know, there's going to be a lot of anxiety.
03:56I mean, this is definitely a unique and very severe infectious disease.
04:02But again, while human-to-human transmission is a possibility, it tends to be rare.
04:08Of course, what we want for the passengers as quickly and in a safe way possible
04:14is to obviously be able to get off the cruise ship.
04:17But that needs to be worked out with the World Health Organization.
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