WHAT WAS CLAIMED
Hantavirus shares its name with the Hebrew word ‘hanta’, meaning ‘fraud’ or ‘scam’.
OUR VERDICT
False. Hanta is not a Hebrew word and the virus is named after the Hantan River in South Korea.
AAP FACTCHECK - Social media users are being duped by a false claim that the hantavirus shares its name with a Hebrew word meaning 'fraud' or 'scam'.
Experts say the word 'hanta' does not exist in Hebrew and the claim could be based on a misreading of the Hebrew word 'kharta', a slang phrase for 'nonsense'.
In fact, the hantavirus was named after the Hantan River in South Korea, after the virus was first isolated from an infected rodent found in the area in 1978.
The claim has appeared hundreds of times on social media following a cruise ship hantavirus outbreak that was reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) on May 2.
A May 12 Facebook post claims: "The Hebrew word 'Hanta' translates to 'Scam' or 'Fraud' in English."
"This is the scam virus. Four Aussies apparently in quarantine. Give it a couple weeks before the 'outbreak.'"
The same claim has also appeared on X, Threads, Instagram and Reddit.
Some of the posts include screenshots of AI search engines purportedly verifying the claim.
However, the AI search engines in question appear to have merely repeated false claims posted on social media.
X's AI assistant, Grok, admitted to users that it had been mistaken in previously verifying the false claim.
Ran Porat, from the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University, said the word 'hanta' did not exist in Hebrew, but the claim could possibly have been based on a misreading of 'kharta' ('חרטא'), a slang word that broadly translates as 'nonsense'.
"The Arabic verb is 'kharta', meaning nonsense, and in the Israeli language, which is the modern Hebrew, there are many slang words that were taken from Arabic," Dr Porat told AAP FactCheck.
"For instance, one use of the word 'kharta' is 'kharta barta', meaning complete nonsense," he said.
"So 'kharta' means nonsense mostly. That's popular in Israeli slang."
Dr Porat said some social media posts falsely linking hantavirus to the Hebrew language were likely attempts to argue "it's always the Jews' fault".
"The Black Plague and similar were sometimes blamed on the Jews, so anyone repeating that claim is possibly using the same frame of mind or platform or formula that was used in the past for anti-Semitic tropes," he said.
A history of hantaviruses published in the journal Diseases in 2023, says that studies into hantaviruses began after hundreds of US soldiers were hospitalised with an unknown illness during the Korean War.
The virus causing this outbreak was isolated from a mouse in the same area of Korea more than two decades later.
Outbreaks of illnesses with similar symptoms have been recorded in Asia for more than 2000 years, the paper says.
The virus is now thought to have also been behind numerous outbreaks of illness in the 20th century in Europe and Asia.
It is primarily spread by contact with the urine or faeces of infected rodents and cases are relatively rare.
However, one strain of the virus endemic to the Andes in South America is known to be able to be transmitted between people, according to the WHO.
The WHO has confirmed this strain is the cause of the recent outbreak involving a Dutch cruise ship.
The claim has also been debunked by Snopes and other fact-check organisations.
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