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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Okay if anyone cares I found the article talking about the outbreak in Argentina about a decade ago, where one person went to a birthday party with 100 people and gave it to 10 of them.  I think the person was actively sick though, with a fever and coughing.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2009040

I’m very curious about the jobs of the people on the ship that got sick.  It’s been reported one was tj doctor but I wonder if the other two were people that were actively helping the man who got so sick.  If he was sick enough to die on the boat he probably needed assistance getting to the sick bay or getting to his room or whatever.  [/quote]

One of the main criticism of that New England journal article was that the authors sequenced the virus, found that the patients had the same strain, but did not investigate whether they had a common exposure other than the party, especially since most of them lived in the same town. Some of the patients had minimal contact with the index case. Perhaps they had gotten infected by an environmental exposure in town - we don’t know because they didn’t look for any other cause.

The other thing we know is that in several studies, after a clusters of Andes virus infections, they did bloodwork on the health care workers and the town residents and no one had antibodies to hantavirus, meaning that they had not been exposed to the virus despite having human to human contact with the patients.

I am the retired ID doc and I would love to have the epidemiologist chime in here - I think the number of infected patients points to either rare human to human transmission from a unique situation that entailed l sustained and close contact, or a shared exposure. The shared exposure seems less likely because both crew and passengers were infected. If it were just passengers, it would point to an exposure from an excursion.

On the bright side, I suppose that the 100+ people on the norovirus plagued cruise ship can at least be relieved they have norovirus and not hantavirus. [/quote]

This is very interesting, thanks. I didn’t see that a crew member was infected? I saw just passengers. Either way, even though they are assuming that it was from a bird watching trip, couldn’t it be possible that it was from a rodent infestation on the ship?[/quote]

Apologies, I am probably  mistaken there - I thought that there was one crew member that was positive, but perhaps they just had symptoms of some sort.

And by the way, you might be wondering why hantavirus is not easily spread from human to human unlike other viruses like the flu, it’s because influenza hijacks our cells to replicate virus particles, then it kills the cell and the virus is released into our airways. Hantavirus also hijacks our cells to replicate virus particles, but it doesn’t kill the host cell, and instead causes a frenzied overexuberant immune response that kills us. So there isn’t a massive amount of viral particles being expelled in our airways. That is why if it is indeed transmissible between humans, it requires unusually close contact. [/quote]

Interesting- so similar to a cytokine storm, but just causes it super frequently, unlike deaths from cytokine storm from the flu?  [/quote]

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