In 2018, health authorities in southern Argentina were racing, trying to understand what had caused nearly three dozen people in the tiny village of Epuyen to fall gravely ill. By the end of the outbreak, 11 of them had died.
Their illness, which caused many to be admitted to intensive care for pneumonia and severe breathing problems, was caused by the Andes virus, a strain of rodent-carried hantavirus capable of being transmitted from person to person. It is the same virus that’s believed to have sickened eight passengers traveling on the MV Hondius cruise ship, which is sailing to a port in the Canary Islands.
Before the Epuyen outbreak, very little was known about the Andes strain, said Dr. Gustavo Palacios, a microbiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.
“There is very limited experience handling this virus,” said Palacios, who was the director of the Center for Genome Sciences at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases when he helped piece together how the virus moved from person to person. The study of the outbreak was published in 2020 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“Probably we are having less than – I don’t know, I’m giving you a number, just for a ballpark number – 300 cases in history” of human to human transmission of Andes virus and about 3,000 Andes cases overall, Palacios said. He is also part of a group of experts advising on the ongoing cruise ship outbreak.
Continue reading the complete article on the original source
