As the world continues to monitor an outbreak of deadly hantavirus on a Dutch cruise ship off the West African coast, many on social media have wondered if the rare, rodent-borne illness could trigger the next global pandemic and reinstate Covid-era lockdowns.
Researchers are tracing passengers who were potentially exposed to the virus in Georgia, California, Arizona, Virginia and Texas and in other countries around the world.
But experts still say there is little reason to believe hantavirus - and even this rare strain - will spread widely.
"The key to transmission is shedding virus in the presymptomatic and asymptomatic phase," Vincent Racaniello, Higgins Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Columbia University, told Newsweek Wednesday. "Influenza and SARS-CoV-2 are very good at it. For hantavirus, the barrier is efficient human-to-human transmission," he said.
Even on the vessel with nearly 200 passengers and crew, infections have only been seen in people with the closest contact, including as a married couple. Three people have died, including the couple, and three cases of hantavirus have been confirmed by laboratory testing since mid-March.
The ship is currently making its way to the Canary Islands, where it is expected to evacuate passengers, none of whom are showing symptoms of the virus, according to shipowner Oceanwide Expeditions.
Several passengers have already been medically evacuated and 30 guests disembarked the ship at St. Helena on April 24, including six of the ship’s 17 Americans.
Hantavirus is fatal in nearly four out of 10 people who are infected, with fever and dizziness typically seen within two months after contact with an infected rodent, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But the risk to the American public remains “extremely low,” the agency assured Wednesday.
That’s a sentiment echoed by the World Health Organization and its leaders, too.
“This is not the next Covid, but it is a serious infectious disease,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the organization’s director of epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “Most people will never be exposed to this.”
A virus such Covid is much more easily transmissible through the air and can spread before symptoms start.
Whereas this strain of hantavirus, known as Andes virus, is usually limited to people who have close contact with the ill person - though there has been little research conducted on its spread.
It can also be spread for weeks after falling ill, but a previous outbreak in Argentina showed the window for transmitting Andes virus appears to just be about a day, Dr. Gustavo Palacios, a microbiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, told CNN.
First detected in the U.S. in the early 1990s, the virus has had plenty of time to explode.
"If it were going to become an epidemic, it would have happened a long time ago,” Thomas Ksiazek, a virologist with extensive experience tracking emerging infectious diseases, also told Newsweek.
While experts are insistent that the next pandemic is not Andes virus, researchers have long warned it’s on the horizon.
The prospect of disease outbreaks will likely triple in the coming decades, with the probability of a pandemic similar to Covid sitting at about 2 percent in any year, researchers at Duke University’s Global Health Institute said in 2021.
“Is there another pandemic coming? Yes. When? Which pathogen? How severe will it be? No one can say for sure,” Yonatan Grad, a professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a statement in 2024.
“But the big demographic changes that are coming, due to climate change as well as economic and other factors, will alter the landscape and create new risks, both for new pathogens to emerge and for known pathogens to re-emerge,” he added.
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