Hantavirus FAQ

Hantavirus is a genus of rodent-borne viruses (Orthohantavirus) that cause Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome (HPS) in the Americas and Hemorrhagic Fever with Renal Syndrome (HFRS) in Europe and Asia. Different strains cause different syndromes; reservoirs are species-specific rodents.

Almost never. For nearly every hantavirus, transmission is from rodents to humans, not human to human. The single exception is Andes virus (ANDV) in Argentina and Chile, which has documented person-to-person spread in close-contact settings.

Primarily through inhaling aerosolised dust from rodent urine, droppings or saliva, especially in enclosed spaces. Less commonly through bites or contact with mucous membranes. See /transmission for full detail.

It is "airborne" only in the sense that contaminated dust gets aerosolised when disturbed. It does not spread through coughs and sneezes between people the way SARS-CoV-2 or influenza do, with the narrow Andes-virus exception.

Typically 1–8 weeks after exposure, most commonly 2–4 weeks.

Initial symptoms (HPS): fever, chills, muscle aches, fatigue. After 4–10 days, rapid shortness of breath. HFRS adds back pain, low blood pressure, and reduced urine output. See /symptoms.

It depends on the strain. Sin Nombre HPS ~36% case-fatality; Andes HPS ~25–40%; Hantaan HFRS ~5–15%; Puumala HFRS <0.5%; Seoul HFRS ~1–2%.

No specific antiviral is licensed in most regions. Treatment is supportive: IV fluids, oxygen, in severe HPS sometimes ECMO. Early ICU admission improves outcomes. Ribavirin is used in some HFRS settings in Asia.

Hantaan-family vaccines (Hantavax, others) are licensed in South Korea and China. No widely available vaccine exists for the New World HPS hantaviruses (Sin Nombre, Andes, etc.).

See the live map at /map. Hantaflow aggregates outbreak signals from CDC NNDSS, WHO Disease Outbreak News, ECDC, PAHO and reputable news outlets in 17 languages, updated every 10–60 minutes.

From public-health surveillance feeds (CDC NNDSS, WHO Disease Outbreak News, ECDC CDTR, PAHO, UKHSA, Public Health Scotland, RKI SurvStat, Santé publique France) and reputable news monitoring (Google News RSS, GDELT 2.0). Every signal links to its source. See /sources and /methodology.

Yes. The JSON feed at /api/signals.json is free under CC BY 4.0. Please credit "Hantaflow" and link to the underlying source for each item. See /widgets for the embeddable map widget.

We monitor 25 Google News RSS feeds across 17 languages (English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, Greek, Russian, Polish, Korean, Chinese, Finnish, Swedish, Dutch, Indonesian, Vietnamese), each with the localised hantavirus search term. Signal titles are stored in the original language; we do not automatically translate.

Until recently, we trusted the geo-target of each Google News feed as the country tag for its articles. That was wrong: Portuguese outlets that cover an Argentine outbreak were tagging Portugal. The current attribution scans each article title and summary against a multilingual country-name dictionary (Unicode CLDR plus stem overrides for Russian, Polish, Greek and Turkish), strips virus names that contain place words (Andes, Sin Nombre, Seoul, Hantaan, Puumala, Dobrava, Choclo, Laguna Negra), disambiguates Georgia-country vs Georgia-state by US context, and only attributes when an explicit country is named in the article. If nothing matches, the signal stays in the global feed but is marked "unattributed" and contributes to no country pin. The breakdown for any country is at /api/countries/<slug>.json under stats.attribution. The full hierarchy is documented in /methodology.

Seoul virus (SEOV), one of the global Old World hantaviruses, naturally infects brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) including pet rats. Outbreaks among pet-rat owners and breeders have been reported in the US, UK and other countries (not from Sin Nombre or Andes).

Climate-driven shifts in rodent populations are increasingly cited in surveillance literature as a factor in emerging hantavirus geography (e.g. mast years influencing Puumala incidence in Northern Europe). It is one factor among several, alongside habitat change, urbanisation, and shipping.