After a rare hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship killed and sickened several passengers, you can’t go online without seeing rumors and news about new cases and suspected infections — or so-called treatments that are most definitely not treatments.
It’s hard not to panic about a new virus after the terror of the COVID-19 pandemic, but infectious disease researchers stress that hantavirus is not at that level of concern right now. Still, people’s very real trauma from COVID is only making the misinformation and grossly exaggerated statements worse.
Understandably, some of that concern stems from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s layoffs and cuts to science research ever since Donald Trump became president again in 2024. With Trump’s administration at the helm, can you trust what the CDC is doing and saying about hantavirus?
“Is the government understating things? At this point, there’s not really strong evidence for that,” said Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist. “The current evidence really does support a low risk to the general public.”
That said, experts aren’t totally thrilled with the way the administration has handled hantavirus communications.
“I think the response has been maybe weaker or slower than some people would like,” Wallace said. “I think there is some evidence of that.”
The CDC releases Health Alert Network notices when there is a health situation it wants doctors throughout the country to know about, Wallace explained. It released a HAN notification about hantavirus this past Friday, she said, but it was “a little bit delayed from what we would think would normally happen.”
“The CDC is not sufficiently responding, and part of that is because we pulled out of the WHO,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist.
Not being part of the World Health Organization means the U.S. isn’t involved in certain aspects of the hantavirus response that we likely would have led in the past, such as the genomic sequencing of the virus, Malaty Rivera added.
Communication on the CDC’s social media accounts has not been as robust as in previous administrations, and Malaty Rivera noted that there wasn’t an immediate press briefing.
“Jay Bhattacharya [the director of the National Institutes of Health], instead, was on a news network recently and said that everything was being done according to protocol — and that’s just not true,” Malaty Rivera said. “We would have typically seen a much better and much more direct response.”
RUSLANAS BARANAUSKAS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images
The World Health Organization remains a reliable place to look for hantavirus updates.
The CDC is supporting U.S. passengers who were aboard the affected cruise ship, the MV Hondius, and have since disembarked. There is a quarantine facility in Nebraska where those passengers are being monitored.
“But I am not impressed with how the CDC has responded to this, and I think that as a consequence of what we’ve seen in the last couple of years: the collateral damage of politicizing public health in this country and gutting our multilateral partnerships,” Malaty Rivera continued.
“What we wish is that the CDC was still part of this international public health [response], because diseases don’t know borders,” Wallace said.
Public health is important at the local, state, national and international level, Wallace said. “Us leaving the WHO was not smart because this is the type of thing where we need that international communication, and we need to be part of it. We need to be at the table.”
In a statement to HuffPost, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said, “the U.S. government is conducting a coordinated, interagency response led by the Department of State” and that federal health agencies are “supporting efforts to protect the health and safety of U.S. citizens, including repatriation, medical evaluation, and public health guidance.”
The spokesperson added that the CDC “activated its Emergency Operations Center to support response activities and deployed a medical team to assess American cruise ship passengers traveling to the Canary Islands. It tracked and notified state health departments of returning U.S. travelers and initiated state-level monitoring of potentially exposed individuals who had already returned. … The agency also hosted national stakeholder coordination calls, refined exposure assessment tools, and released a hantavirus outbreak toolkit for the public.”
Here’s who to turn to for accurate, up-to-date hantavirus information.
The CDC is releasing information about hantavirus, but not as much or as often as experts would have hoped. So where can you look for detailed, up-to-the-minute hantavirus data?
“This is a challenge … we’re telling people to basically go to the WHO, which we’ve always said,” Malaty Rivera said. “It’s embarrassing because we’re not part of it.”
But the World Health Organization is a reliable resource, she stressed. “They’re following international health regulations about how to manage this outbreak and control it.”
The WHO puts out daily hantavirus communications, including on social media. “They’re pretty comprehensive and pretty good and they have a really good understanding of the entire international picture,” Wallace noted.
You can also follow reliable public health communicators on social media and/or Substack, such as the two experts quoted in this story and others:
Following experts who don’t fearmonger or profit from your worries is important during stressful times. But it’s important to remember that the risk that hantavirus poses to the general public is low right now. The average person does not need to change their behavior or travel plans, according to Malaty Rivera.
“This definitely is not the same virus as COVID-19, and it doesn’t have the same pandemic potential that COVID-19 had,” Wallace said.
Yet, this moment ― when virus rumors are rampant and public health infrastructure is threatened ― is worrisome.
“What is looming in the future,” Malaty Rivera said, is an “actual disease of pandemic potential for which we are not prepared … because of how we have systematically gutted our global health security preparedness efforts and funding and response.”
This is an unusual situation — a hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship — that requires close monitoring, Wallace said, but just because it’s unusual doesn’t make this “the next COVID” or something worthy of conspiracy theories online.
