00:01Three people have died in an outbreak of a rat-borne disease on a luxury ship.
00:07So what exactly is hantavirus and should you be worried about it spreading?
00:12They're relatively rare infections.
00:15Daniel Bausch is a specialist in tropical diseases at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland.
00:20He said the virus is only rarely passed between humans and is most commonly spread when people have contact with
00:26rodent droppings, urine or saliva.
00:29But a cruise ship might create the conditions for person-to-person infection.
00:33We know that cruise ships and other events where we pack a lot of people into small places,
00:39that they always have the risk of human-to-human transmission of different pathogens.
00:46Hantavirus usually begins with flu-like symptoms such as fatigue and fever.
00:51Four to ten days later, coughing, shortness of breath, and fluid in the lungs appear.
00:55And so we can see in hantaviruses that people develop essentially a pneumonia or a consolidation,
01:02a fluid filling up in their lungs, and that can happen very rapidly.
01:08Bausch says there's no specific antiviral drug for hantaviruses.
01:12Treatment, he says, often requires hospitalization in an intensive care unit.
01:16It's not the sort of treatment that is generally available on a cruise ship.
01:21The World Health Organization said it's been told there were no rats aboard the ship.
01:25Its working assumption is that the cases originated in a Dutch couple who joined the ship in Argentina.
01:31That couple may have been infected before joining the cruise.
01:34Hantaviruses have, or can have at least, a relatively long incubation period.
01:39Incubation period is the time from when you get exposed to something to when you fall sick.
01:44And so in hantaviruses that can be, in extreme cases, up to six weeks.
01:50The World Health Organization assesses the overall public risk from this current outbreak to be low.
01:55This is not the next COVID-19. This is not going to be a big outbreak.
01:59This is not a reason for your average person in the world to panic at all.
02:03If you had tickets for a cruise, I don't think you need to cancel it.
02:07And now that you know that it's possible, because it's pretty rare.
02:10I'm gonna go to the next day.
