Scientists think the hantavirus, the deadly pathogen that has infected 11 passengers on a Dutch cruise ship, could be as old as humans. But much of their understanding of human cases comes from a handful of outbreaks within the past century.The first known outbreak came during the Korean War in the 1950s, when around 3,000 United Nations troops developed a mysterious illness that scientists would later recognize as hantavirus.But it wasn’t until some 20 years later, in 1978, that scientists linked the virus to a rodent near the Hantan river in South Korea, which gave hantavirus its name.AdvertisementAdvertisementThe first cases in North America were diagnosed in 1993. And in 1996, an outbreak in Argentina marked the first confirmed instance of person-to-person transmission.Hantavirus is rarer, but far deadlier than respiratory viruses like Covid or flu. Only one strain, which is not found locally in the U.S., is capable of passing between humans. That strain is the one involved in the cruise ship outbreak, which has forced passengers from across the world to quarantine.The limited number of past outbreaks could offer clues about how the cruise ship passengers got sick — but doctors who have studied hantavirus said there’s more to learn.“Because the disease is so incredibly rare, it’s been very difficult to study in the sense that we don’t really have the numbers,” said Dr. Charles Chiu, a professor of laboratory medicine and infectious diseases at University of California, San Francisco.AdvertisementAdvertisementFewer than 900 cases were reported in the U.S. from 1993 to 2023. Cases can also be hard to investigate because many people die quickly after developing symptoms. Up to half of hantavirus cases can be fatal, depending on the strain and method of transmission.“The current outbreak will teach us more, because we’ve had very few of these events with more than a handful of patients,” said Dr. Gregory Mertz, emeritus professor of internal medicine at the University of New Mexico.Here’s what we know about the major outbreaks over the last several decades.Outbreaks in the Four Corners and Yosemite In 1993, public health officials began investigating a mysterious …
