An unprecedented and deadly hantavirus cruise ship outbreak, it explained

“This is not COVID. This is not the flu. It spreads, very differently,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s associate director of epidemiology and epidemiology, emphasized in a press release on Thursday.

Given the nature of the virus and the precautions and monitoring already in place, “the risk of spreading to the general public is very low,” Michael Marks, an infectious disease specialist and professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said on Thursday.

Comments are heard a definitive risk assessment Wednesday from the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, which explained that even if the disease spread from the people removed from the ship, the virus “does not spread easily so it is unlikely that it will cause more cases or spread to the community, if prevention and control measures are used.”

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also deemed the risk to Americans to be “very low” in a briefing Wednesday evening.

So why are infectious disease experts and public health officials so confident that it won’t cause another global health crisis?

Here’s what we know about the virus and its spread

Hantavirus infection

The virus spreading on the ship is a member of the large hantavirus family, which spreads throughout the world. These are enveloped, single-stranded RNA viruses whose genomes consist of three segments.

So called The Ancient World of hantaviruses (including Hantaan, Seoul, Puumala, and Dobrava-Belgrade) are found in Africa, Asia, and Europe, with many activities in China, Korea, Russia, and other European countries. The first recognition of these viruses dates back to the 1950s, with infections among soldiers fighting in the Korean War. These pathogens cause hemorrhagic fever due to renal disease (HFRS), malaria, hemorrhagic fever, and kidney damage. Depending on the hantavirus involved, the fatality rate is between 1-15 percent.