Hantavirus on a cruise ship

This Andes virus does have a really long incubation period.

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New Mexico’s UNM Hospital says 15-25% of deer mice in NM carry hantavirus and that there are 30 other species of small mammals that also carry the virus, including squirrels, chipmunks and house mice.

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The Sin Nombre hantavirus has had a variety of names, including the Four Corner virus and Muerto Canyon virus, after locations where there have been outbreaks.

Muerto Canyon is located in the Navajo Nation reservation and both Four Corners and Muerto Canyon are associated with the Navajo peoples. Tribal leaders objected to the names and pointed out they had led to increased prejudice against Native Americans .

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Funny story- My brother in law got the Hantavirus about 20 years ago - lived in NM at the time. Was cleaning out an old shed and well… mice droppings and such.
Luckily, he was one of those that was not seriously affected by it and had a generally easy (by comparison of many) recovery.
(and obviously not this strain that has been in the news with human-to-human transmission)

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I worried about hantavirus when my DS and DH did the Philmont scout trip many moons ago, but fortunately it was less of an issue than the bears!

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I think that I’ve already written this, but the prevalence of infection by Hantavirus among mammalogists who study rodents in the SW is practically zero. While epidemiologists and virologists take precautions, field biologists are notorious for their blasé attitude towards zoonotic disease.

None of the mammalogists (field ecologists, evolutionary biologists, etc) that I knew even wore masks when handling mice, and even gloves were rare. If the Hantavirus species that are found in the USA were highly contagious, we would have seen more Hantavirus cases. At a Mammalogy meeting which I didn’t attend, they took blood samples from a huge number of mammalogists and none showed antibodies. As an aside, only one showed antibodies for Lyme disease, and everybody already knew that he had actually suffered from Lyme disease.

On the other hand, in a course in Kenya, which included CS and ecology grad students, around 6 students were infected by Q Fever (only 4 were tested, but all were sick). All of the students who handled domesticated sheep were infected - they all wrangled sheep (mostly tried to wrangle sheep and failed, much to the amusement of the herders) to place radio collars on them.

Of course sheep are more likely to have diseases that have mutated to be able to easily infect humans.

[Aside]
One of the students who was infected, my wife’s grad student, was lucky that my wife forced the urgent care to transfer her to the ER of a hospital which had an infectious disease department. The students was running a 105 fever, and had to be immersed in ice water before the medication brought down the fever. The infectious disease people, though, were extremely excited - it was the first Q Fever case that most of them had ever seen (epidemiologists happen to be like that).
[/Aside]

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Let’s try this. I was blocked from posting a link to the same article on CNN. See if this works.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/spanish-national-evacuated-hantavirus-cruise-ship-tests-positive-2026-05-25/

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This is a bizarre story…

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I would have done it for $100k! :laughing:

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