May 11, 2026

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Hantavirus outbreak occurs at sea, microplastics may contribute to warming, and Alaska landslide sparks tsunami

A deadly hantavirus outbreak occurs on a cruise ship, scientists warn that microplastics may be contributing to climate warming, and a retreating-glacier‑triggered landslide unleashed a massive Alaska tsunami

By Rachel Feltman, Tanya Lewis, Andrea Gawrylewski, Fonda Mwangi & Alex Sugiura

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Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Let’s kick off the week with a quick roundup of some science news you may have missed.

First, you may have seen some headlines last week about an outbreak of hantavirus on a cruise ship. Here to tell us more about what happened is Tanya Lewis, SciAm’s senior desk editor for health and medicine.

Tanya, thanks so much for coming on to walk us through this.

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Tanya Lewis: Yeah, no, thanks so much for having me.

Feltman: Why are we talking about hantavirus and this cruise ship? What happened?

Lewis: Just to catch people up, this outbreak was first noticed about a week ago on a ship called the MV Hondius, which was a cruise ship departing from South America, Argentina. And the people that were sickened and unfortunately passed away, two of those individuals were a married couple who had been traveling—it was a Dutch couple—we think were infected in Argentina and then boarded the ship. And then subsequently, multiple other people have been infected. As of May 7 the number of people on this cruise ship who had been infected with hantavirus was eight people. So that probably could still change.

But you might not have heard of hantavirus before, but it is a virus family that people have been sickened with before, and it’s generally spread by rodents, like rats or mice. And this commonly happens in places where people are exposed to the feces of these animals.

And it causes pretty severe disease. It can cause anything from respiratory distress and fluid in the lungs to some forms of it can be more of, like, a hemorrhagic fever, kind of like Ebola. But the kind that we’re seeing on this cruise ship is more the respiratory kind.

But yeah, this is a virus that, while it is fairly rare to be infected with it, it’s quite lethal. The estimates of its lethality vary, but anywhere from, like, 30 percent to even 50 percent of people infected have died of it.

Feltman: Right, well, and like you said, it, it’s usually spread through rodent feces. But unfortunately, the specific virus we’re talking about, with regard to this cruise ship, is one of the rare instances where it is technically possible to spread from human to human. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Lewis: Basically, these individuals on the ship were thought to be infected by human-to-human transmission. At least, that’s the working hypothesis right now. And the reason has to do with the exposure routes.

As I mentioned two of the people were a married couple, so we’re talking about, like, very close contact. This is not something like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, where it’s, like, in the air and wafting around for hours or something. This is something that you would probably need to be, like, breathing very closely, in the same space. And of course, cruise ships are, like, kind of the perfect petri dish for that.

Feltman: Yeah.

So I think there are two things to talk about. There’s, one, why experts are not immediately super concerned about pandemic potential from this specific thing, but also why it is reasonable that I think so many of us, when seeing this news, went, “Uh-oh. We’re—this is a reminder of public-health paradigms I do not wanna be reminded of.”

So let’s start with the good news: Why are experts not freaking out about this?

Lewis: Yeah, so we have to remember that this is a virus that is very different than a lot of the pathogens that have caused respiratory pandemics in the past. In order for a pathogen to be a major pandemic concern, it needs to be very transmissible, and that is something that we have not yet seen with this hantavirus.

I should say, this particular strain is the only strain that has been shown to transmit human to human; it’s called the Andes strain. Most hantaviruses are not thought to spread that way. So the good news is, it’s kind of rare. The bad news, maybe, is that it does appear to have spread, at least, you know, in a limited way, between people.

But yeah, i