What the (rather brief) history of hantavirus reveals about its spread

Scientists think the hantavirus, the deadly pathogen that has infected 11 passengers on a Dutch cruise ship, could be as old as humans.

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.

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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.