A man in China who tested positive for hantavirus died on Monday while traveling to the Chinese province of Shandong for work on a chartered bus with 32 other people, according to state-run media.
Though human-to-human transmission is rare, the people on board the bus were also tested, but results are presently unclear. The man who died has not been publicly identified, and his exact cause of death was not immediately clear.
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Hantaviruses are a family of viruses that are spread primarily by rodents.
Sumaiya Shaikh, a neuroscientist in Sweden and a science fact-checker for Indian fact-checking agency AltNews, urged people not to panic about the hantavirus.
“The #Hantavirus first emerged in 1950s in the American-Korean war in Korea (Hantan river). It spreads from rat/mice if humans injest their body fluids. Human-human transmission is rare. There were even vaccines developed for it. Please do not panic, unless you plan to eat rats,” she said in a tweet.
“Hantaviruses in the Americas are known as ‘New World’ hantaviruses and may cause hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS). Other hantaviruses, known as “Old World” hantaviruses, are found mostly in Europe and Asia and may cause hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS),” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Each hantavirus serotype has a specific rodent host species and is spread to people via aerosolized virus that is shed in urine, feces, and saliva, and less frequently by a bite from an infected host.”
Some symptoms of HPS include fever, muscle aches, chills, vomiting, and coughing. According to the CDC, HPS caused by hantavirus infection has a significant mortality rate of 38%. Two instances of person-to-person transmission of hantavirus have been recorded in Chile and Argentina, both involving close contact with patients diagnosed.
The news comes as countries around the world contend with the novel coronavirus pandemic, which began in Wuhan, China, late last year.
The World Health Organization concluded the COVID-19 virus first appeared in the city of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in China. The WHO’s investigative report in February concluded that “early cases identified in Wuhan are believed to be have acquired infection from a zoonotic source as many reported visiting or working in the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market.”
Nearly 400,000 people have tested positive for the coronavirus in every continent but Antarctica. Globally, at least 17,000 have died from it, and more than 103,000 have recovered. In China, there have been at least 81,558 confirmed coronavirus cases, more than 3,200 deaths, and 73,280 reported recoveries, according to the latest reading of the Johns Hopkins University tracker.
